Swapping drive letters


  1. Posts : 118
    Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
       #1

    Swapping drive letters


    Is it possible to swap drive letters around?

    I want to swap the C: drive to be the F: drive, is this possible?

    Thanks
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 2,164
    Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
       #2

    swapping the system drive is harder than swapping other drives, and I don't recommend it.
    is there a reason why you want C to be F?
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 118
    Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
    Thread Starter
       #3

    The F: drive is the new hard drive and is faster than the older C: drive. I'm cloning the current C: drive and I want to make it bootable in the end.
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 2,752
    Windows 7 Pro x64 (1), Win7 Pro X64 (2)
       #4

    Why wouldn't you want to (or expect to) end up with a new C on the new drive?

    Are you planning on ending up with TWO hard drives in the machine? And you simply want to move your current C on the old drive to the new drive? It will have to remain C (from its own perspective) even if transplanted onto the new physical drive.

    You'll need to change your BIOS to make that new drive "hard disk #1", i.e. the boot drive, in order to boot from it. And the installed Win7 boot manager will still letter it as C (from its own perspective).

    Your old drive, if you retain it, will be assigned the new drive letter (F, if you want, anything else that you want using DISKMGMT.MSC)... when booting to Win7 now transplanted onto the new drive. But that newly transplanted and re-located Win7 will always see itself as C.

    I'm assuming that your "cloning" process also creates the 100MB "system reserved"partition on the new drive, as that is truly the "active bootable partition" in which Win7's boot manager files are located for a 1-OS "from scratch install" environment. Those boot manager files in turn by default (in a 1-OS environment) automatically and instantly (without any action from you) select the OS contained in the actual Win7 partition to truly boot to, assigning it drive letter C.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 118
    Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
    Thread Starter
       #5

    I see, thanks for giving me an insight into this :)
      My Computer


 

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