Change Letter option greyed out
I've copied two partitions to an empty disk with Disk Directory 10.0 Build 2.239.
The first is a small Dell diagnostic partition, and the second is a 74 GB partition with Windows XP installed.
The Dell partition was assigned C: and the other D:
I want to remove the drive letter from the Dell diagnostic partition, and assign C: to the Windows XP partition.
The Disk -> Advanced -> Change Letter option is greyed out for both partitions.
How can I get this option to work?
Thanks.
Tom
I booted from the Disk Director CD. I'm copying partitions from a USB drive to the internal hard drive on the computer. The partitions were copied from two different computers with Disk Director.
On the USB drive, the Dell diagnostic partition has no drive letter, and the Windows partition is F: when viewed from Disk Director.
On the internal drive to which the copy was done, the Dell diagnostic partition became the C: drive (primary), and the Windows partition became the D: drive (primary, active) after copying from the USB drive to the internal drive.
I also copied the MBR from a computer that has both partitions on its internal hard drive to the new internal drive.
When I rebooted the computer, I got the following error message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll
I booted into Recovery Console from the Windows XP SP3 installation CD.
The MAP command showed the Dell diagnostic partition witout any drive letter. The Windows partition is C:. Good!
It would be useful if the actual drive parameters would be shown in Disk Director, as I assumed that what I saw in Disk Director were the drive letters that would actually be used when the internal drive is booted.
In Recovery console I ran FIXBOOT C: and FIXMBR C:. Same boot error.
I researched some more, and tried the BOOTCFG /REBUILD in Recovery Console. That caused the system to boot correctly.
See http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm for details.
Except I had a Select the operating system screen with two choices. Read some more and used MSCONFIG to edit the Boot.ini file to get rid of the extra Windows entry.
Now everything works OK.
It seems like there should be an easier way to get to copy a diagnostic partition and a Windows partition to a new drive without have to use Recovery Console to make it a bootable computer. Is there a way to get all of this done within Disk Director? If not, it would be good to add the functionality to create a bootable drive with this partition configuration from within Disk Director.
Tom
Tom:
That's what True Image does best.
The drive letter issue is another story. People expect drive letters to be absolute but they're not. You can have a partition that is viewable by N different operating systems, and each operating system can refer to it by a different letter.
In standalone boot environments (like the DD boot CD) the letter assigned to a partition may bear no resemblance to the letter seen when booted to another operating system.
Drive letters are an ancient carryover from DOS and I wish they would go away because they confuse people all of the time. Linux does this better by referring to a partition with an identifier that is absolute; not relative. In other words, (hda2) is the second partition on disk a.
In Windows, the second partition on a disk can have any letter of the alphabet. It's a stupid system.