"Charles W. Johson Jr." past to present
wrote:

From that panel you can assign fixed disk letters. Although all I saw
different was you renamed E: to System2 rather than system and the usage was
different.

Charles, Jim: Thanks both. I may be making heavy weather of it, but
it's been a long day! The devil is in the details, so excuse this
rather long explanation.

Since posting, I've made some progress with the default boot issue.
Pretty deeply buried, I found XP System PropertiesAdvancedStartup &
RecoverySettingsSystem Startup has a box for 'Default Operating
System'. So I can change that easily.

Trouble is, I can't get what's left of my brain around just *which*
one to choose. I've currently changed it to
"Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (#2)" /fastdetect /NoExecute
but they look identical once I'm into XP. Of course, if I keep
swapping, I'm going to get into a mess. (Already, I'm not sure which
'system' I was in when I sent my last post here from my newsreader,
Agent. So I expect threads will start to look a bit confusing in a few
hours unless I stay putg.)

Basically, what I want is what I had: to boot up to a 'system'
partition called C, on my original (oldest) hard disk. So this would
also be the 'boot partition', yes?

This is how it looks right now, after changing the boot partition in
XP Properties:
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Misc/Mess2.gif

If I left it like this, then I'd be working from system C. That's
good, because C is the familiar label. But I'd be accessing most of my
data and many programs on Disk 2, which makes me uncomfortable. I want
my activity to be confined mainly to one hard disk, my original MAXTOR
60 GB disk 1, and only access identical MAXTOR 60 GB disk 2 for backup
of data nightly. Plus hopefully rare emergencies when I need to boot
into the alternative (increasingly older) XP system.

But if I arrange to boot from E, then the goods and bads get reversed,
yes? So it seems to me I 'just' want to relabel C as E, and E as C -
but without screwing up the registry and hundreds of shortcuts.

I'm beginning to consider using Drive Image again, this time to copy E
to C. Sort of reverse whatever happened before. But I don't think I'm
brave enough ;-(

--
Terry, West Sussex, UK