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Back on 22/10/2011 I bought a 64Gb SSD and installed Windows 7 on it. Because I already had an HDD with Windows on it, for some reason Windows installed itself on H:\, but the actual boot partition still seems to be on C. No worries, it still worked just fine.

So, now, I have C and D for files and data on one HDD split into two partitions, and H is the Windows SSD drive.

I've now got a 128Gb SSD and the plan was to copy Windows onto the (now empty and unformatted) 128Gb drive and use the 64Gb for swap/temp and also scratch file area for things like GIMP.

I followed this Lifehacker tutorial and grabbed a copy of EaseUS Todo Backup Free as recommended.

It decided to rename the COPY of windows to be A:, and windows would not boot when I removed the old 64Gb SSD and put the new 128Gb SSD with the clone of windows onto the same SATA port. I found you cannot rename the current OS drive letter in Disk Management.

So I tried Partition Wizard; again, cannot change current drive letter, even the bootable ISO CD version wouldn't let me change any drive letters.

SevenForums explains how to change drive letters via Regedit, but also says: WARNING: Do not change the C: drive letter. so I'm not sure about doing that.

I also followed this SU answer Reassigning drive letter for cloned system partition but all that did was to assign Windows to be the old drive, but on a different letter.

Next up - "Partition Saving" on UBCD.

Perhaps I'm being a bit thick, but I found the instructions incredibly confusing. Here's the relevant part:

If you copy a partition onto another disk (without copying partitions table) or if you move the beginning of a partition (for MBR partitions table), you have to update the information in the registry for each partition that you moved for Windows to be able to still use the same drive letter. In the case of restoring a partition which has not been moved, this is not necessary.

Execution is composed of 2 parts: first, to designate where Windows is installed so that the program can find the registry file; second, to give the partition to be updated in this registry. If you copy the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven partition, the Windows installation that should be updated is the one that was the destination of the copy.

You have copied the Windows XP partition from disk 1 to disk 2. In this case, drive letter of Windows XP on disk 2 shall be C: for this Windows to be able to boot. So, you have to modify registry of Windows XP on disk 2 to swap drive letters. For this, you have to launch Partition Saving, choose the update registry option, choose disk 2 and first partition as partition where Windows is installed. Then you select first partition of first disk and give it the D: letter. Then you launch Partition Saving again, again select first partition of second disk as Windows partition, then select first partition of second disk to give it the C: drive letter. If you copied also the data partition, you have to perform the same thing for second partitions with drive letters E: and G:. Once you have performed this, if you boot with the first disk Windows XP, you still have the same configuration as above (this one has not been modified). But if you boot with the Windows XP on second disk, you get (considering you also swap data partitions drive letters):

Can I change drive letter of my Windows installation from X: to C:?

Once Windows is installed with a given drive letter, you can no more change this drive letter (unless reinstalling it). Option provided by Partition-Saving is to treat case where you save your Windows system and restore it on another partition than this origin partition. It allows you to change drive letter of this new partition for it to get the same drive letter than the origin one such as Windows appears to not have been moved.

Follow that? I clearly didn't, as it didn't seem to work for me.

Thinking right back to the start of this post, you can see I installed Windows back in October 2011 - that's over 18 months ago, so I wouldn't be averse to doing a brand new install (though I'd rather not as the current install works just fine).

But even if I go down that route, I'd still like to know how to do this correctly, where I have gone wrong, and what I have missed. Thanks.

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    What part don't you understand? The quoted text basically says its not possible to change the installation partition unless you clone the hdd to another hdd then restore it back to the origin hdd or simply reinstall the operating system
    – Ramhound
    Jul 25, 2013 at 18:21
  • That's not what it says at all - the whole purpose of the utility is to avoid that situation. Please read again. I see the question has been marked down. Perhaps if someone can explain which tags I've used inappropriately or where I've failed to correctly structure sentence or provide evidence of research, then I can correct that. Jul 26, 2013 at 9:47
  • If you know it says then why did you say your confused about what it says? I bet my understanding of the quote is correct
    – Ramhound
    Jul 26, 2013 at 19:30

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