Advice for answering an upgrade question

[BobMCT]

HI all,
Had a strange question from a colleague today that I could not provide a simple answer to. Perhaps some of you here can advise?
Assuming a customer has an older PC with two physical drives referenced as C: and D: with the windows system is installed on the C: drive and various programs are installed and some of them reference files on both the C and D drives.

If the customer wanted to replace both older drives with a new single drive as C: what is the best approach to handle the references to the former drive D: with as little impact as possible?

I can think of several ways but none that don't require some thought.

Ideas/Suggestions???

Thanks

 

[Beilstwh]

The easiest way is to use the windows SUBST command. You can open a cmd window and type SUBST /?
to see the options. I would make a folder called D off the root of C and then move everything from the D: drive into the D folder. Then type

SUBST D:C:/D

You will now have a logical drive D pointing to the contents of the old D drive. The reason that I would move it to a folder, but not off the root to stop any problems with identical folders or files between the 2 drives.

Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA

 

[edfair]

I would probably create a C: and D: on the new hard drive. That would keep anything on D: away from any glitches on C:

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[xwb]

Beilstwh - the slash is the wrong way round. It should be

subst D: C:\D

Put it in a batch file and move the shortcut of the batch file into startup

 

[Beilstwh]

Thanks xwb, I typed the wrong key. I appreciate the catch

Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA

 

[BobMCT]

Thanks gents. The SUBST was what I was planning but not having had to use it for many moons I was wondering if something different/newer was available. If it works, it works. However, does the subst command survive reboots or must it be inserted into a startup mechanism?

 

[strongm]

>However, does the subst command survive reboots or must it be inserted into a startup mechanism?

I think xwb's post -"move the shortcut of the batch file into startup" - addressed this

 

[Beilstwh]

You can also put the mapping into the registry so it is available at boot up. See the very nice write up on SUBST in Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBST

Bill
Lead Application Developer
New York State, USA