Moving Windows XP
I'm reorganising the hard drives in my computer and want to move my windows XP partition to a new drive. This will mean the XP partition will no longer see its self as c:, but for example d:.
I've gone into the registry and cleared all keys in, as I understand XP rebuilds them when mssing.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MOUNTED_DEVICES
It boots to the desktop, but beyond that does little else than let me show the start menu. Clicking on things has no real effect.
What else to I need to do? Bare in mind the XP partition has been moved to a 1TB disk, that also has a Windows 7 and another Windows XP partition on both working fine.
I've gone into the registry and cleared all keys in, as I understand XP rebuilds them when mssing.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MOUNTED_DEVICES
It boots to the desktop, but beyond that does little else than let me show the start menu. Clicking on things has no real effect.
What else to I need to do? Bare in mind the XP partition has been moved to a 1TB disk, that also has a Windows 7 and another Windows XP partition on both working fine.
Post edited by Scottie_uk on
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Comments
Why? There will be millions of registry keys and config files that refer to drive C
Why does the drive letter have to be changed to D?
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dunno if they do a boot manager for all the things you use still ? basically have it as a "C" drive but as hidden..
and it only unhides when your using it / select it from the menu.
forgot prog that I used to use years ago, but 1 xp was configed for normal use and other was optimised for music.
think it might have been
http://www.osloader.com/
The easier thing would be to move XP partition from old drive to same-numbered partition on the new drive. For example if it was 2nd partition on old drive, copy to 2nd partition on new drive. Then add Windows 7 and (if necessary) figure out how to make bootable again / integrate in a boot menu.
2 XP installs on the same drive? Windows 7 already installed, and then add an XP install onto that? Not saying that would be impossible, but well... good luck. :razz:
The modern day method: virtual machines (in this case, probably hosted on that Win7 system). And guesser is right - as soon as drive letters are changed, you will be f**king with a million application settings. Wasn't there some Windows built-in tool to set drive letter mappings as needed? Wouldn't know, long-time Linux user here. :)
it's not impossible to have 2 xp's.. but well hiding the "unused" one is the best option to avoid any confision.
But the XP install presumably doesn't even need to mount the other partitions let alone care where another operating system mounts them.
Perhaps that "gone into the registry" is the problem here. :???: You didn't do that in the XP install on your old drive, did you? Does that XP install still boot & work properly?
Basically the point would be that when the old XP install (that is: its copy on the new drive!) boots, the partition it sees as C: has the same contents as the partition that was seen as C: on the old drive. Then you avoid the need to mess with registry, application settings, etc.
When you get to a desktop, that suggests the "make copy bootable" already succeeded. Not sure why there's a problem at that point... Have you already tried this with the old XP install copied without registry tweaks beforehand, and then boot with only the new drive attached?
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
Lettering. It's lettering Arjun. Lettering.
Just saying....
Yes, yes, but my point was...
That's the weird part. That particular assumption that we would have floppy drives in 2013. And not one but two of them at that. Hell, the new Macs don't have a CD drive either! Technology marches on relentlessly!
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
as I've had to blind flash a laptop the odd time.. from usb floppy drive.. no screen prompts , nothing. pretty sure the disk was "sector" or "raw" copy , so couldn't be done via other USB devices.
I liked the idea of having an OS where it knew where stuff was put.. e.g. my SSD drive on my music pc.. I don't want apps or plugins on.. but it always try to default there as it's the C or Boot drive.
That's not difficult to overcome, just tell it the programs directory is on a different drive and it will happily default there instead.
What annoys me more are installers that will only install to the default path instead of having some sort of "advanced" or "expert" mode where you can select a sensible one. Microsoft's own software is usually the worst offender here :smile:
I would have thought that the best option for designing an OS would be to have one registry entry or environment variable that specifies the the installation drive letter, so that moving the OS would be simpler.
However, I do then appreciate the sloppy programmers hard coding C:\\ problem. However, when you make a BartPE live CD from XP, it works weather the CD rom is D: , E: or G:. So why the same can't be done for the actual OS I don't know.
Anyhow it turns out the original partition and the close of it are having problems. I may just rescue important files (if there are any) and junk it once and for all. There is only so long you can keep it going and that one was originally set up in late 2002 and has been though 3 motherboards, so I mustn't grumble.
I still don't get why you don't just map that partition as C: and leave everything else alone :-o
Since operating systems no longer reside on removable media with limited capacity that needs disks swapping all the time, the best option for designing an OS would be to mount all storage under a single tree rather than a separate tree for each device. ;)
So if I had two installs of XP on one HD on seprate partitions would each one see itself a C: when running?
Yes. The drive letter it assigns to the partition is whatever you tell it to assign.
I can't remember where in the registry it's stored and whether it does it by physical location or what. It's not something that you would normally need to fiddle with since the installer does it for you.
The registry location is:
HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
There's an entry for each volume and each logical drive, and you can re-map them as appropriate.
On the whole I'm not sure I'd recommend this, but if you've got two Windows installations that want to be in the same folder on the same logical drive, it's probably the only way of doing it.
I think manually editing the drive mappings will be necessary if you want to move a windows install to a different partition.
It's not something I've ever had to do because whenever I've moved a windows install to another disk it has been to the same partition. i.e. it was installed on the first primary partition on the old disk and I just clone the disk over so it is still on the first primary partition of the new disk.
Obviously if the existing windows install maps drive C to the first primary partition but you actually have the data on the second primary partition or whatever then it will get itself into a state.
Two XP partitions and a Windows 7 partition all living happily together on a 1TB drive.
The process is quite involved and at one point involves editing the boot sector in a hex editor. I used the below document as guidence, he is Forking an single installation into 3 separate versions onto one disk. However, there was enough juice in their for me to complete mine.
http://www.dominok.net/en/it/en.it.clonexp.html
Right tomorrow, I'll try to add Mint Linux and Windows 8 onto my new disk.