Changing a harddrive's boot partition

[richb14]

I want to change my harddrive's boot partition (to D) as I want to format the drive that is the boot partition now (C). How can I do this?

[jordi2k]

Couple of ways really.

Use BIOS to select the HDD you want to boot from first (usually identified by Manaufacturer and not Drive Letter).

OR, manually swap the Master and Slave drives by using the cables or jumpers (may only work on IDE drives)

Usually if you format a drive your PC will detect there is no OS installed and try the next drive in sequence.

There may be other ways, but these should work just fine.

[deso]

You'll have to have an OS installed on D first, disconnect C (if it's a different physical drive) and check it will boot on D, then reformat C and do whatever you need to do then reinstall OS on C if that's your intention.

[OBonio]

To boot a different partition (as opposed to a different DRIVE) you need to play around with your boot.ini file. Saying that, your boot.ini resides on the C: drive so when you wipe that... it will stop booting...

So, you need to change the Master Boot Record so that it looks at drive D:... Luckily there are other boot managers in the world that can do this such as LILO (Linux LOader) and GRUB.

I've heard GRUB is easier to configure and there appears to be a windows install version :

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?g roup_id=104188&package_id=112041&release_id=27 2964

HTH

[OBonio]

Just to give you some more info on the boot.ini file :

http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/b ootini.htm