Boot Drive in XP Home

[Tekboy]

I have a customer with a WinXP Home machine, that was upgraded from Win98.

Anyway, there are 2 hdd present, and the upgrade installed itself on the D: drive. If I ghost the drive over to C:, will it still boot?. Or wil I get an "HAL" error?

D: drive is only 2GB and is rapidly runing out of space. Need to know by Tues. She has very little money, so if anyone has had this experience, you will save a single mother of five some money.

Thanks in advance.

[Archer]

It wont boot because you will have overwritten the boot.ini file placed on the C drive by the XP install and the registry entries will be incorrect.You could ghost it then run the repair console but would it be easier to just reinstall it to the C drive?

[Tekboy]

It wont boot because you will have overwritten the boot.ini file placed on the C drive by the XP install and the registry entries will be incorrect.You could ghost it then run the repair console but would it be easier to just reinstall it to the C drive?

So if I edit the boot.ini to boot from C: before I ghost, do you think that would work?

[Archer]

When you ghost to C you will overwrite the file it will no loger be there.............plus as I said all the XP registry entries will point to the wrong files.

[Tekboy]

When you ghost to C you will overwrite the file it will no loger be there.............plus as I said all the XP registry entries will point to the wrong files.

This is an old PIII 450, so the fastest (therefore cheapest) thing to do, I guess would be to ghost D: to C:, then reverse the drives and format the new C: drive, which is only 2GB, and use it for strictly storage, but no OS or programs.


The added benefit will be to eliminate a FAT32 partition in the system, hopefully gaining some commensurate stability and security.

Thanks Archer!