hi everyone,

i bought a new laptop and it came with the OS installed on the 2nd
partition. i wanted to rearrange, reformat, and re-partition, so i did that,
then restored from a backup image. but i restored it to the 1st partition,
and so it failed to boot. i realized the problem and restored to the 2nd
partition, and that works. but i want the system partition to be the 1st
partition. i tried modifying the boot.ini file (where ever i saw
"partition(2)" i changed it to "partition(1)") but no luck, it still wouldn't
boot from the 1st partition. (i accomplished all of this by restoring the
original backup image to the 2nd partition, modifying boot.ini, making a new
backup image, then restoring the new backup image to the 1st partition). so,
next i tried to modify the registry
(hkey_local_machine\system\mounted_devices), but if i delete all of the
values in that part of the regsitry, my backup software won't allow me to
make a backup (it tells me that there is a file missing). i think that part
of the problem is that, straight from the factory, the 1st partition was a
hidden partition. and now, every time that i create two new blank partitions
the 1st one is always not visible (windows will not assign it a letter or let
you browse it... somehow windows remembers that the 1st one should be
hidden). does anyone know how to unhide a partition?

any advice on how i can restore my backup image to the 1st partition and
make it boot from the 1st partition will be much appreciated.

many thanks in advance for your guidance,
ryan