Transferring a C: drive Image of the Primary Bootable Partition to a second Primary Drive Partition ( Drive L)

I have XP Pro presently installed on the C: Primary partition on an
IDE
hard drive and am about to restore an Image File of this C: partition
onto
the Primary
partition of a second SATA drive . This partition has the letter L .

It is my intention to eventually remove the IDE drive and thus have
the PC
boot to the XP-installed SATA drive , thus , if sucessful, avoiding
the need
to re-instal XP.

Before doing this I am wondering whether this will work as I
understand a
Bootable partition has to have the letter C.

Is this a correct assumption , does anyone know ?

If this is a requirement , will changing the drive letter from L to C
in
"Disk Management" be all that is required here ?

B.N..

David, imaging your drive back to the same partition usually presents very
little problems. Imaging to a different drive, different
partition usually results in difficulties. One major difficulty is Path
Variable changes. Programs are looking for C: and now it's
changed to L: Also if I remember correctly you cannot change the System
Drive/Partition Letter. So you will be stuck with
L: You can try a Repair Install after you imaging but if you go that
route you may as well just reinstall WinXP. Hopefully
you have a Slipstreamed WinXP + SP2 CD. If not there are many sites that
will instruct you on how to create one.
www.eldergeek.com comes to mind. Get AutoStreamer. Mucho easy with
that.
David Rhind wrote in message
...

I have XP Pro presently installed on the C: Primary partition on an
IDE
hard drive and am about to restore an Image File of this C: partition
onto
the Primary
partition of a second SATA drive . This partition has the letter L .

It is my intention to eventually remove the IDE drive and thus have
the PC
boot to the XP-installed SATA drive , thus , if sucessful, avoiding
the need
to re-instal XP.

Before doing this I am wondering whether this will work as I
understand a
Bootable partition has to have the letter C.

Is this a correct assumption , does anyone know ?

If this is a requirement , will changing the drive letter from L to C
in
"Disk Management" be all that is required here ?

B.N..