Win7 & Win 8 HDs. SWAP OS's across drives

MilesAhead said:

I am not worried about letters

I'm not referring o running out of letters but hard coded references to drive letters. When you move stuff it's a nightmare. Hard links can help some but it's not as simple as Linux where it only cares about the directory tree location.

Ideally there would be some sort of monitoring database and when you moved installed programs the locations would just point to the new places. Not sure exactly how to do it. But of course the backward compatibility thing discourages MS saying much about it.

My inclination would be to have an associative array where the id of the software would index to a location string. The location string itself could dereference to a unique id. If you moved the software the system would realize it when it started dereferencing the human friendly readable string/location name and the loader would get the current valid location from the database or something of that sort. Basically you would drag & drop the install folder in Explorer and click relocate instead of move when you drop it.

Or something better thought out. But it has to be possible with the fast CPUs ans SSDs these days.

Whichever OS boots is drive C:. Not much to work around...

Once I swap them, they will still see the booting OS as on drive C:\, so no issues...

Whichever OS boots is drive C:. Not much to work around...

Once I swap them, they will still see the booting OS as on drive C:\, so no issues...

I know. MS went back to that to make their lives easier. But it's not the case with every Windows OS. One of my HP machines was dual boot W7 and XP. W7 was on C:. It saw XP as on H:. But when I booted XP it saw itself as on D:. So their are issues when dealing with more than a naked OS that has to be C:.

MilesAhead said:

Whichever OS boots is drive C:. Not much to work around...

Once I swap them, they will still see the booting OS as on drive C:\, so no issues...

I know. MS went back to that to make their lives easier. But it's not the case with every Windows OS. One of my HP machines was dual boot W7 and XP. W7 was on C:. It saw XP as on H:. But when I booted XP it saw itself as on D:. So their are issues when dealing with more than a naked OS that has to be C:.

On my server, my OS HD was the 4th drive, according to BIOS, but first in boot order. I have one update [Server 2003] that won't install because it's not first in the BIOS...

Do I need to CONCERN myself with the size of the system reserved partitions? How accurate must I hold the sizes to? Are they based on how big the drive was/is when the OS was installed? [Win8 is much larger than Win7]

I did it with Ghost. Now Win8.1 is on the SSD, and all is well.

Win7 won't boot. I need to get the install disk and do a repair...

Viscon said:

JoesMorgue said:

Do I need to CONCERN myself with the size of the system reserved partitions? How accurate must I hold the sizes to? Are they based on how big the drive was/is when the OS was installed? [Win8 is much larger than Win7]

I never dealt with SRP and ghost as I don't have one on any of the systems here.
Anyway to avoid future headache I would leave their original sizes while restoring.
Just remember that SRP must be active, not windows partition.

It was something with the boot settings...

Now it says "Windows 7 Ultimate (recovered)" How do I change the name?