Do I need a C: drive?

I’m not technically sure about this (so maybe I shouldn’t be answering?), but I would think that if you can boot from I: then you don’t need C:. The letters should be essentially meaningless. I think the use of C: is just a holdover from the past, when you had a 5¼ floppy on A: and a tape backup drive on B:.

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Windows will survive without a drive named C:.
That’s just the default letter the first harddrive gets (A and B are reserve for floppies, at least in XP. Carried over from the days when floppy drives were common).

Just delete the partition that your current OS is on, replace it, format it, and Setup will designate it as C:. If you do run Windows from any drive but C:, certain programs that look for a pre-defined path assuming C: won’t work properly, but there are workarounds for this.

Thanks pdworkin, but what I’d really like to do is expand the D: partition that is on that hard drive to take over all the space that was on C: drive. Then I just want to have a larger D: drive without a C: drive. I don’t want to have all of my other drives changing letters. If I do what I propose, will windows re-designate my D: drive as C:, since I will no longer have a C: drive?

Not unless it starts with an empty partition. I had Windows on an F: drive and it messed up 2 minor programs that I made a fix for. You may never have a problem. Just realize that you can reassign the letters to all your drives except the bone your OS boots from.

@pdworkin Is “bone” a fancy technical term for a hard drive that I’ve never heard before?

It’s what happened when I tried to type “the one” on this stupid netbook. Sorry.

@pdworkin I just had to give you a hard time.

@gussnarp A; and B: were both reserved for floppy disks, in the days before hard drives. B: is not for “Backup”

@pdworkin So now I get a hard time? Turnabout is fair play. I honestly don’t remember what was on my B: drive. I do know that at one time it was a tape drive used for backup.

Windows needs a bootable partition. It doesn’t need to have the C: assignment.

If it’s on a separate physical drive from Windows 7, why not try unplugging it before booting?

You can go into Disk Management (click Start, then Run, then type “diskmgmt.msc”) and resize partitions except, of course, the partition you’re booting from. So if your c: drive is actually just part of another hard drive, you should be able to rid yourself of that and resize the d: partition. Clear as mud?

Thanks very much for your advice. Now that I’m ready to do this, when I go to disk management there doesn’t seem to be an option for format or delete or erase this C: partition. Those are ‘greyed’ out. The only options I have are “open”, “explore’, “change drive letters”, “shrink”, “properties” and “help”. This C: partition is also listed as “system, active, primary partition”. What to do?

Boot a partition utility from the CD ROM drive, or run something like Partition Magic which will let you choose the task while Windows is running, but will then restart your computer to do the actual operations in a little DOS kernel.

I’ve tried using easeus partition manager but the same thing happens. It will only allow me to resize or copy. All of the other options are once again ‘greyed’ out. This is getting very frustrating.

You can’t do it from Windows. Does the Easeus program have a bootable disk?

Actually, boot your install disk. you can do it from there.

I have tried your suggestions and have removed the C: drive and resized the D: drive only to render my system non-bootable. I had to resize the D: drive and restore the C: drive in order to get it to boot again. There must be something on the C: drive that my system needs in order to boot. I’m not a techie, but maybe it’s the “master boot record”? I do appreciate all of the helpful comments, but at this point if you do not have a technical background and have not performed this procedure before, please refrain from adding your comments. So right now I’m back where I started.

I’ve done it a million times between 1981 and today. Have you tried booting from the OS installation disk, and tried making the new partition from the installation app?

I’ve not tried booting from the install disk. I can give that a try but also keep in mind that since I’ve installed win7 there was a boot loader installed so that I can boot to either winxp or win7. I think this is where my problem lies. I want to get rid of the c:winxp partition but the boot loader and/or the mbr won’t let me.

If I boot with the win7 installation disk the only thing it will let me do is to install windows 7? no?

What I tried and perhaps I was not very clear here, was to boot with the Acronis rescue disk and with disk director deleted the c: partition and re-sized the D: partition. This is where the problem started. After that my system would not boot. I had to reverse the process and re-install the c: partition/winxp system.

Is your Win7 an upgrade or a stand-alone? If it is an upgrade, what are you upgrading from? If Vista or XP, use your Vista install disk and boot from it. It will detect your partitions and ask where you want to install the OS. Use it to delete, remake and format the the drive with the dual-boot partition. Make a single partition. Then when that OS is installed, run the Win7 install disk from within windows (in other words, let the newly installed Vista or XP boot) and then do a “clean” install of Win7. A round-the-block way of doing it, but you won’t lose your MBR in the interim.

Thanks, I understand what you’re saying. I upgraded from winxp and did a clean install onto one of my 3 hard drives, not the C: drive. So I left winxp alone on the C: drive and put win7 on I: drive. Now it dual boots to either, but I’ve set win7 up so that it boots directly into 7 by setting it as the default o/s and 0 seconds to choose. I don’t really want to muck around with my win7 partition as it’s all set up with all of my apps. Is there not any way that I can safely remove this boot loader or move the mbr to I: drive?

Yeah. Run bootmanager from the command shell (check help to see what the exe file is really called, something like bootmngr), delete the XP partition and use it for documents or file storage or whatever. Then you will only have a possible problem with install programs that want to install programs on c:\ by default, but if you always do a “custom” install that should solve that problem.