"Paul Busby" wrote in message
Rod Speed - typed:
Paul Busby wrote in message ...
Rod Speed - typed:

Depends on how you do the copy. If you use a dos based copy
like Ghost or Drive Image, the crucial thing to do is to make the
copy, AND THEN TURN THE SYSTEM OFF AND RESET THE
MASTER AND SLAVE before you let XP boot again.

That goes without saying. I've asked the wrong question. I'll
rephrase it. Will WinXP try to reassign drive letters if it sees a
2nd active partition has been added? Other versions of Windows (DOS,
W3.1, W9x) would assign the letter D to any new active partition,
incrementing the other drive letters in the process IIRC.

OK, no, the NT/2K/XP family doesnt do it like that and even
if it does do something to the lettering that you dont like, you
can reassign the letters, unlike with the Win9x/ME family.

I had in mind that XP can change the drive letter designation 'cos I've
set my removable storage devices to count down from Z with that drive
being set in the reg for the install volume but wasn't sure if XP would
tolerate more than one active partition at a time. However, XP can't
change the drive letters of the boot or OS partitions.

I ask for academic reasons 'cos I would always reformat
as an extended partition containing logical volumes.

Thats not necessarily the best approach. The new drive
is likely to be rather faster than the original and so there
is a lot to be said for making the new drive the boot drive.

I presume you're referring to the good sense of running the OS off
the fastest disc rather than formatting any 2nd disc as an extended
partition.

Yep. And there isnt any need to format the 2nd drive as an extended
partition of avoid that partition lettering problem with the NT/2K/XP
family. There are some advantages with having an active primary
dos partition on the 2nd drive, mainly that you can have an OS
installed on that and can boot off that drive if the main boot drive
dies physically. Most modern motherboard bios allow you to just
specify what physical drive to boot from in that situation and carry
on regardless on the death of the main boot drive.

There are many ways to do this such as unhiding unrequired active
partitions where 2 OSs could share the same drive letter or by using a
boot loader app.

The 1st volume on my 2nd disc is currently dedicated to the main
pagefile but its drive letter is too high to be selectable from my Bios

The bios has no knowledge of OS drive letters, only device numbers.
C,D,E and F stand for device 80-83, not C: D: E: and F:.

though I could change the drive letter to be in range of the Bios.

Won't change anything.


It would be nice if XP's EULA allowed a 2nd instance but it doesn't
despite the fact you can only run either instance at a time. I'm not
about to change the 2nd disc's arrangement because it's a simple matter
to repair XP by booting off the CD & the OS partition has been stripped
down by moving nearly everything that can be to other volumes - cuts
down fragmentation & minimises the effort of reinstalling XP from an
image file. Thanks for the feedback