"Bob Harris" wrote:
> Be aware that there are very many entires in the registry of XP and
> separately in the registry for Vista that point to a drive location, such as
> C:\...\...\. If you move the contents of the paritions in a way that changes
> the drive letters, say C:\ to D:\, then one or both will not work.


At least for XP that is not true - probably not true for Vista as well.
What gets invalidated is the menu for the boot loader. For XP, this
menu is in the boot.ini file in which "partition()" is the parameter which
refers to the no. of the partition in which the OS resides, and "rdisk()"
is the parameter which designates the HD where that partition is.

Evidence that the letter name of the partition that the drive was
installed on does NOT matter is that I can clone a bootable XP from
any partition on any HD in my PC to any other partition on any other
HD in my PC, and as long as the entries in the boot menu that is in use
are correct, that cloned XP can be loaded and run exactly as its "parent"
XP. The letter name of the RUNNING XP clone will probably be
different from that of its "parent" XP, but that will not at be a problem.
The only problem that can occur involving partition letter names is if the
USER creates shortcuts which involve letter names to other partitions,
since those letter names will not be valid in the new partition arrangement.

*TimDaniels*