Windows Drive letter swap.

[Mark_h]

One for you Microsoft types. Please don't guess if you don't "know"

I have a PC running Windows 8. I've recently added an extra physical drive. The original drive is partitioned as two logical drives.

So
drive #1P0 = C: ----> C:
drive #1P1 = D: ----> X:
Drive #2P0 = Y: ----> D:

I want to end up with drive #2P0 as D: Eventually I'll repartition #1 as a bigger C: and use X: as a physical backup for some critical files on the new D:

Now then.... Switching drive letters is dead simple but I'm not sure if the apps and OS reference the drive by letter or partition. eg,

If I shift content from D1P1 D: to D2P0 Y: then reassign the drive letters will the apps happily now look on D2P0 because it's now labelled as D: or will it still look on D1P0 even though that is now tagged as X:

Can't just do a partition shift to the new spindle as I've got other stuff on the current Y: that I want to keep that's too big to temp shift elsewhere.

Anyone know for sure?

Then I need to have a fight with ITunes about moving and merging libraries which is likely to get a tad frustrating.

[timwilky]

When I have messed about moving adding drives etc. I have ended up using 3rd party registery editors that allow bulk rename of key values etc to change the paths for apps etc.

*nix type OS are are far superior in everything being referenced from a root and being able to point to stuff by symbolic links etc.

FFS even in days when I used to drive VAX VMS, I would always point to physical locations by logical names to avoid being tied to that physical name.

[Mark_h]

Originally Posted by timwilky

When I have messed about moving adding drives etc. I have ended up using 3rd party registery editors that allow bulk rename of key values etc to change the paths for apps etc.

*nix type OS are are far superior in everything being referenced from a root and being able to point to stuff by symbolic links etc.

FFS even in days when I used to drive VAX VMS, I would always point to physical locations by logical names to avoid being tied to that physical name.

All well and good but I'm in a windows world and moving to unix may be a tad overkill.

My plan is to keep the drive letters and paths correct just move them to a new physical spindle and partition so really it comes down to whether windows manages via drive letter or partition.

[Mark_h]

So-far so good. Apps seem to follow the assigned drive letter rather than pointing at anything more physical. Even iTunes happily took it which is pretty amazing for anything apple related on a windows device.

[kaivalagi]

Yeah, in windows everything on top of the OS will be path based so as long as you maintain a drive letter to the same data regardless of the partitioning you'll be fine.

You can substitute drives in the command prompt or via batch files if you really need to as well, would help if you wanted to consolidate data onto a single drive but fake a drive letter to a folder path to maintain functionality etc. Have a look at the SUBST command, maybe it could help in the future (I haven't checked in Win 8 but I presume it's in there too)

SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D

  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
                 a virtual drive.
  /D             Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.