Tech Support > Microsoft Windows > Performance/Maintainence > Drive letter assignment, new drive swapped, reformat old drive
Drive letter assignment, new drive swapped, reformat old drive
Posted by JimLewandowski on March 10th, 2006


I had a PC with one old hard drive partitioned into C: and D:. The ONLY
software was on C: with D: being all my data/documents/etc.

I installed a new Seagate HD using their DiscWizard software. Formatted new
HD and copied old drive to new one. All OK.

Time for the master/slave swap. Reboot. All OK (or so I thought).

Instead of expecting to see:

C: main boot (NEW drive)
D: data partition (NEW drive)
G: old drive boot partition
H: old drive data partition

I'm getting:

C: NEW drive main boot (expected)
D: STILL OLD drive data partition
G: OLD drive boot partition
H: NEW drive data partition

I used DISKPART and made G: "inactive" and rebooted expecting to see the
desired drive letter assignments but no change. I see using DISK MANAGEMENT
that G: is still a "primary" partition.

Can I just use DISK MANAGEMENT and reformat this drive? I'm reticent tot
try because you can only format a LOGICAL partition. IOW, I can't right
click on the DRIVE, but only on the PARTITION.

I'm thinking of trying to use Seagate's DiscWizard software that I used for
the install, but I don't think you can format WITHOUT copying data from
somewhere.

What is my best course of action to reformat COMPLETELY and REPARTITION the
old drive TO MATCH EXACTLY the current boot partition. IOW, I'd like to size
the 1st partition on the old drive to match EXACTLY the size of the boot
partition on the new drive.

JL


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