Re: How to move an OS install from one primary partition to another?
>> IMHO, your biggest problem won't be with copying/ghosting/dd-ing your
>> Windows partition: your biggest (in fact, unsurmountable) problem will be
>> all your C:\Windows and C:\Documents and Settings and C:\Program Files (and
>> similar) references, hard-coded into your Windows Registry. IIRC from my
>> (over forever, thankfully!) Windows days, there was no *easy* way to make a
>> Registry, built on a C:\ drive to work reliably on a D:\, E:\ and so on. I
>> think your best bet is to use the swap (hd0,hd1) command in Grub (the syntax
>> is wrong, since I'm quoting from memory, but you surely know what I mean).
>> If beside the drive letters (partition locations) their respective sizes
>> are also a problem, just resize them with GParted, it's an *incredibly*
>> mature piece of software.
> To come up to date a little, Windows can now re-letter drives persistently.
> Of course, you do need to boot into it to change the default... but even in
> the old days, Windows wouldn't label a drive at all unless it recognised the
> filesystem, so you could have one or two Linux partitions ahead of a Windows
> one which would still get labelled C:. You could also get away with some
> out-of-order partition numbering, at least with the NT series. The only
> official way of getting NT4 onto a large drive involved two separate
> installations of it and some decidedly dodgy partition ordering, placing a
> primary after the extended partition. What you really had to avoid with a
> multi-partition Windows installation was adding a second drive containing
> one or more primary partitions, the first of which would be auto-lettered
> D:, which would totally screw up Windows.
> The Vista bootloader bears no resemblance at all to the NT-to-XP version.
> There's no boot.ini and in fact no text configuration file. Configuration
> must be done with a Microsoft utility. On the plus side, the bootloader is
> much more powerful, and among other things can schedule a number of boots to
> different OSes. This is useful to remotely dual/multi-boot without getting
> stuck in one OS.
With Vista and 7 (boot.ini was dropped with the move to Vista), you
can edit boot parameters (and boot from non-C disks) with bcdedit.
Reply to: