system drive problems and windows update

[theauditors]

I recently ghosted everything on my 20g hdd to my new WD 80g SE hdd.

I then formatted the ol' 20g one.

I changed the jumpers around, then used PartitionMagic 7.0 to change the drive letters so that the 80g was C: and the 20g was D:

Anyway, everything seemed to be going just fine, until I checked in System Properties -> System Restore.

I was going to turn off System Restore on the 20g hdd, but I was met with the folliwng message:

(D Suspended

(D is the system drive. You cannot turn off System Restore on this drive without turning it off on all drives. blah blah blah...

System Restore is suspended because there is not enough disk space available on one of the drives. To restart system restore, click Disk Cleanup blah blah...

Disk space to use:
3% (630MB)

A quick trip to My Computer revealed that there was 5g free on that drive, so I sincerely doubted that there wasn't enough space.

Anyway, it wasn't that much of a problem, because System Restore was still working on the other drive.

However, I had another problem when I went to Windows Update this morning to get the patches that microsoft has recently released...

They failed to install. All of them. They downloaded fine, but wouldn't install.

I went to install them to them from the download location, and discovered that it was, in fact, in a folder called WUtemp on the D: drive. Which my system now seems to think is the system drive.

Whenever I tried to run any of the updates, I got the error:

Setup could not verify the integrity of the file Update.inf. Make sure the Cryptographic service is running on this computer.

Of course, the Cryptographic service was running.

Anyway, does anyone know how to tell my stupid computer that the system drive is, in fact, C: instead of D:? Is there some registry key that'll help me here? I'm curious to see what would happen if I removed the 20g hdd from the computer and tried to boot it up...my computer might have fits about an absent system drive

But frankly, I can't be bothered...

Thanks in advance, guys!

 

[damnyank]

Don't know if this is any help or not.

Look here

 

[theauditors]

nah, unfortunately that's not what I'm looking for

I've already changed the drive letters to what I want them to be

now I just have to convince my computer that the System drive has changed.

 

[PCdabbler]

XP doesn't work like that, as I found out to my cost as well ... The only way to do is to image the DISK not individual partitions. Ghost will let you set new partition sizes for the bigger disk., or use partition magic to set it up beforehand. Incidentally, I had to do a full re-istall to recover from the mess.

 

[PCdabbler]

As a follow up to this, there is a way to make ghost force a reset of all the drive letters .. read.. (from Ghost manual)

As a result, when the booting operating system fails to locate
the file due to the drive being allocated a new drive letter,
a boot failure occurs.

Solution
--------
When running Ghost, you can use one of the following
command-line options.
a. Initialize the disk signature using the -FDSZ (force disk
signature zero) switch. Initializing the disk signature
forces Windows to discard any existing drive letters
and to start reallocating new drive letters from scratch.

Note: Ghost generally performs this initialization
during a Windows disk load operation. It will not
perform this initialization if you are only loading a
partition. In this case the -FDSZ switch should be used to
fix a boot failure.

b. Alternately, if you wish to retain the allocated drive
letters use the -FDSP switch (force disk signature
preserve). This will only be required on Windows
disk load operations that result in a boot failure.

QED ?