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Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations

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Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations

Postby HelgeS » Sat Jul 31, 2010 4:43 am

I just got an Intel X24-M 80GB SSD for booting XPSP3 and Win 7 faster, and it looks like the hardware works fine. Here's my situation: I want to have duplicates (clones) of XP and 7 on the SSD.

My system was initially a two-drive one where the first, older 40Gb Maxtor IDE drive has two partitions, and the first is System|Active|Primary, starting out as C: that has the BCD, and is formatted to FAT32, since I have an old 98SE installation there to edit a MIDI module's hardware with an old 98SE app that won't run under XP or 7. So, if I want SE, I F8 during XP startup, select 98 SE, and XP does its old sleight of hand with BOOTSECT.DOS, which then loads IO.SYS & starts DOS, and the usual stuff after that to start SE. It's of course oblivious to the NTFS volumes such as its own D: drive, but I can work with the MIDI module when I want.

The second drive is a SATA unit whose first two partitions have no OSes, but the third has XPSP3 (E:), and the fourth Win 7 (F:), both of which start up flawlessly from the BCD multiboot menu with system drives relettered to C:, D:, E: and F:, and the old IDE drives' C: & D: partitions becoming H: & I:.

So, I wanted to multiboot XP and 7 from the new SSD, made four partitions on it, and copied the SATA drive's C:, D:, E: and F: partitions to corresponding partitions on the SSD, N: through Q;, that are clones of C: through F:; but, of course, neither XPSP3 nor Win 7 will start from P: or Q:, since the copied O/Ses' Registries reference E: and F:, respectively. Windows will not allow me to do a system image of 7 because of I: (old C:) being FAT32, which it has to be in order for 98SE to start there, that OS being NTFS-ignorant, right?

I copied E: and F: over to P: and Q: with EASUS Partition Manager, which worked great, but now Win 7 gives black screen with error messages when I try to start that OS there using the new entry, even though I specified in DualBoot Pro to boot the O/S from Q:. Is there a way I can get the N: through Q: installations to reletter as C: through F:, and reletter C: through F: to N: through Q: while running the XPSP3 or Win 7 installations copied to the SSD? Or is what I want to do nonsensical? Seems that something does the relettering of boot-time C: and D: to I: and H:. I don't want to have to reinstall everything to the SSD from the plastic media, for I'll lose my settings & tweaks, etc.

I hear people going <GROOOAAN!!!!>... I'll bet what I want to do might be pretty simple to implement for a multiboot guru. If I need to re-think what I'm doing, tell me. I'm pretty technically competent. Thanks!!
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Re: Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations

Postby shreader » Sat Jul 31, 2010 10:04 am

Moved - more people will see your post here thus get more responses.

I never tried a SSD drive.

Where does Win98 SE fit in the mix above?
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