Does changing the active partition changes the partition letter?

Question

I have several disks, each of them has one ore more NTFS partitions.

The first disk is splitted in 2 partitions; its first partition is active, is called "C:" and doesn't have any OS. On another disk I have a single partition (Z:) which contains my operating system (Windows Seven Pro). Other disks are simple data storage devices and don't contain any OS.

I'd like make things simpler, setting as active the partition containing Seven, but I fear that doing so will cause Seven to see its partition as "C:" (which I really don't want!).

Do you have any suggestion?

Thanks!

Answer 1

From your description I can see that you are booting from one partition, while Win7 is installed on another.

Unfortunately, this means that there are boot files on the C drive which are missing on the Win7 partition. To copy these files you will need to set Folder Options to view hidden and system files. Copy anything from C:\ root directory that looks like it belongs to Windows (most files on the root directory should belong to Windows).

You will also need to temporarily disable paging and hibernation before that, since these files cannot be copied.

Please also note that the new system partition must be a primary partition, or it can't be made active.

I would recommend that after the Win7 disk is ready, just physically swap it with the current system disk, as Windows traditionally boots better from the first hard disk. There may also be other considerations having to do with the disk being positioned as Primary or Secondary.