"wheat66" wrote:
>I have only a SATA hard drive on my computer. I'd like to add
> a second SATA drive, have it be the boot drive and have it be
> labelled C:. It's getting the C: label moved over that is difficult.
>
> Also, if I could do that without a full reinstall, that would be nice.
>
> My attempts to do this with drive copying software and renaming
> partitions in XP have failed.
>
> thanks for any help.
The easiest way to do that is to clone the 1st SATA HD to a 2nd
SATA HD using a 3rd-party cloning utlility such as Symantec's Ghost,
Acronis's True Image, or Future Systems Solutions's Casper. There is
a possibility that your HD manufacturer's website has free downloadable
cloning software that would work if at least one of the HDs is of their
manufacture. Be sure that you choose the option to copy the MBR and
to make the destination partition "active" if you are given a choice. Also
be sure to disconnect the "parent" HD before booting up the clone for
the 1st time. That will keep the clone from confusing itself with its "parent"
OS, and the clone's HD will act as the boot drive because it will have all
the boot files and the BIOS will pass control to that HD's MBR by virtue
of that HD being the only one connected. The clone will calls its partition
"C:" because that is what its "parent" did.
With both HDs connected you can cause the 2nd SATA HD to be
the boot drive either by switching the ports that the 2 HDs are connected
to, or you can manually readjust the Hard Drive Boot Order in the BIOS,
putting the 2nd HD at the head of the list of HDs instead of the 1st HD.
Or, you can add a 2nd entry in the boot.ini file after the line
"[operating systems]" that substitutes "rdisk(1)" in place of the existing
entry's "rdisk(0)". Just put a comment between the 2 quotation marks in
the entry to let you differentiate the 2 HDs in the boot menu, and set the
timeout value to something like "10" to give you 10 seconds to make up
your mind which OS to boot. That will let you dual-boot between the
2 OSes. For ease of recogniaing which OS is running, put a file on each
OS's Desktop with a name identifying the OS. Each OS when it is running
will call its own partition "C:" and it will call the other partitions in the
system by other names, but that is not a problem as long as you've made
no shortcuts that refer to files in other partitions.
*TimDaniels*
