Windows booting problem

[andrewducker]

I have two hard drives. They both have installs of Windows XP on. I choose which one I boot to when I start up. Which is fine.

Except that the primary drive is about an inch from death. And if I take it out then the secondary drive doesn't boot at all - presumably because the boot record is on the primary drive.

A quick google indicates that I should boot to a recovery console and fun "fixboot" - however, when booting off the secondary drive, the drive with everything on it is labelled "I:" - if I fix the boot record, is this likely to stay the same, or will it suddenly be the C drive?

I'd like to have some idea of what I'm in for before I destroy my machine...

Comments

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that, regardless of whether or not it relabels the drive as 'C:', it would render it bootable. Windows is capable of running with a system disk label other than 'C:'. For years, I had a Windows 2000 install that had the system disk labelled as G, and it was the most stable Windows install I ever had (although I suspect this is unrelated to the fact that its system disk was G).

[andrewducker]

Oh, it is. I'm currently running off of drive I.

But was worried that if I get direct booting working that it will think that said drive is actually called "C" and all of my programs will stop working...

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

No, it should be fine. I should have said that not only was G: the system disk, it was also the only disk. It was one of my early Win2000 installs, so I started with a system dual-booting 98 and 2000, and eventually got rid of the Win98 drive. The Win2000 install continued referring to itself as G:.

[andrewducker]

Cool - cheers!

The only question now, is how to make this disk bootable!

[vereybowring.livejournal.com]

Just back up anything essential.
One thing to try is to change the boot record in msconfig to remove the faulty windows first then try to fixboot, although I must say it might completely rewrite the boot record and you lose all your data.
Microsoft is not very friendly to failing hard drives.

Disc magic

[alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com]

If any of your progams stop working you can use diskmagic to change the partition back to I: You can also do it through windows, only I'm not sure if you can do it with your windows based partition. However I don't think that your drive letter will change in the first place.

Backup first though
Remember its Windows
Backup