Obviously you cannot modify the drive letters with regedit unless the os boots off the disk, but I also stated in the first line that you make the disk partition active, and then boot the OS. The steps I outlined are there to get the new cloned OS to believe it's C which it really is since it is a clone, but the wrong drive letter was assigned by the old OS. Your new disk probably has no C since it was assigned a different letter in the old install. When the OS boots up, if it does from the new disk, most programs won't work because they point to drive C which is no longer available.
what exactly were you thinking without having a successful booting OS? You might be able to set the primary active with the XP install CD, but I doubt recovery console will do anything since it probably won't find the OS. bad idea all around to give away the first disk. Now you can boot the OS, but it might not load. All it needs to do is allow you to set the desired partition active. Boot a dos boot floppy, and see if it allows you any access to the disk with NTFS partitions. View image here: -ĭo you know what an Active Primary Partition is? You might be able to set the new OS cloned disk primary to active with Fdisk, perhaps give that a try. I know this because I just did this 2 or 3 weeks ago.
Hope you know how to use Disk Management and Regedit, or you can royally screw up everything. You rename by right clicking the Entry in the right pane in Regedit. Now, find the drive letter of the System drive, the one the OS is booting from, the clone, change that to C:\, rename the original C to something you can live with. Find C:\, rename to a drive letter unique to all others and one you'll remember for a second or 2. Open up Regedit, go to HKLM\System\MountedDevices. If it's not C:\ but the original drive letter as it was assigned from the original install, then you'll need to do some quick magic and pray you did it right. If it's C:\, you should be ok, but check in Disk Management to make sure the right disk loaded the OS. Now boot the new disk, go right into Windows Explorer and check to see if the new clone is C:\ or the original Drive Letter from the original install. Boot the original Install, go into Disk Management, right click the Primary Partition that you cloned ONTO.