garling
Joined: 06 Oct 2006
Posts: 1
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 Posted: 10/06/06 - 04:00 Post subject: How to change a boot drive letter? |
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OK, it gets a little complicated, explaining what I'm trying to do, so bear with me for a moment. I'm thinking of setting up a dual boot system, and having XP installed on one partition, 2K3 Server on the second, and all the other contents on the third (and any other) partition. I would like to have it set up so that when I choose to boot the second OS, the HD partition on which the first one is installed becomes "hidden", and what is actually drive D:\ becomes temporarily drive C:\. When the next time I boot the first OS, the second (D:\) would be hidden, and the third partition (the one with misc contents) would take its place as D:\. Is there some way to enable this in XP and/or 2K3 without risking faulty (program or OS) installations due to drive letter swapping? I'm open to all suggestions here, TIA.
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chi
Joined: 06 Oct 2006
Posts: 1
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| Posted: 03/26/07 - 10:49 Post subject: |
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AFAIK, the default boot manager (NTLDR in both Windows XP and Windows 2003) won't be able to do this. What you need is a third-party manager, such as XOSL from ranish.com, or Gnu Grub from gnu.org. You'll use one of these (they're both freeware, BTW) to set up two primary partitions instead of one. As long as you're doing this on a freshly formatted system, you should have no difficulty assigning drive letters or hiding unused partitions – at least not with installations asking for non-existing drive letters, that is.
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