How to make new drive C drive?

[Laure]

Hi all,
Here's my tale of woe:

(Windows 2000, HP Compaq d220MT) A month ago, I installed a new hard drive because the old one was about full and acting flaky. I used Acronis MigrateEasy to copy old to new, and everything seemed to be fine. The new, bigger, disk (WDC) was Drive C, and the old disk (Maxtor) was still accessible as Drive E.

Yesterday, I restarted the machine (not for the first time since the new disk!) and it would not reboot to the WDC drive. I got "cannot load your profile. Please increase the registry size and restart the computer."

After much investigation, I finally decided to just copy my new work onto the old drive (which still booted ok) and run the Acronis MigrateEasy again & just start from scratch on the new drive.

It seemed to work, but now when I reboot, "My Documents" is on the bigger disk (WDC), the C: drive is the OLD smaller (Maxtor) disk, and the E: drive is the new bigger (WDC) disk. I didn't even think this was possible. So... is it booting to C or to E? Is it even possible to "boot to E"? Why is "My Documents" apparently on the E drive?

I want it back like it was, where the C drive is the new drive, and the E is the old. I figure I shouldn't have to open up the machine to do this, since it was just fine a month ago. What do I do? The boot order is WDC then Maxtor.

Can somebody please help me? Thank you so much.

 

[evongugg]

Do you have a card reader in the system?
Disconnect before transferring Windows or it may mess up the drive letters.

 

[Laure]

Nope, no card reader. I tried disabling the Maxtor and rebooting, and I got (OH NO!!) an error saying that I had no Pagefile.sys, and I should right-click My Computer to fix it (but of course I couldn't because it wouldn't boot). Went into setup and booted to the old drive, and that time, My Documents was the small one, C was the big one, E was the small one, command prompt shows the E drive?!? Both C and E have a pagefile.sys.

But, rebooting again to the big drive, I get the same error about having no paging file! I guess I can try the Acronis MigrateEasy clone again?? Boy, is this puzzling.

 

[knotknut]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323967/en-us

 

[evongugg]

The drive you copied from was flaky according to what you said previously. I think you should do a fresh installation of Windows on the new drive.

 

[Laure]

Thanks for the advice, but reinstalling the OS is just not feasible. I telecommute; I'm in Arizona, company is in Florida. They've got all the CDs. Even if I had a Windows 2000 CD, there's the matter of reinstalling MS Office, Visual Studio 6.0 & 2005, etc., which I guess would have to be done over the network, but they don't even keep the installs for these on a share, and they'd probably want me to ship them the machine.

I re-ran Acronis MigrateEasy again, same result though. I'll Google a bit for info on changing the drive letters in Win2K; the XP article doesn't seem relevant.

 

[Laure]

Update: after my 2nd reboot after the 2nd Acronis MigrateEasy attempt, things seem to have righted themselves. My Documents is on C which is the big drive, E is the small drive, booted to C.

Sure wish I understood what happened. Anyway, thanks, everyone, for your support & have a great weekend.

 

[sandmanwn]

Do yourself a favor and remove the E drive before you get into more trouble.

Why you still have a flaky drive connected to your system after the first successful transfer was weird. But of course, even after all this and finishing a second transfer you still keep it connected.

 

[Laure]

Well, it's a darned good thing I kept it!!!! If I hadn't had the smaller drive, I would have been unable to correct this problem, which happened when trying to boot to the new drive.

 

[Zorg]

You don't have to physically remove it just unplug it.