You used to be able to install Win 7 from an already running Win 7 to another drive and keep your drive letter assignments. i.e. Say you were running Win 7 on C: and you wanted another installation on D: with Win 7 installed as D: You insert a DVD or USB Key and ran setup and direct the new install to D: The second install would have a drive letter D: You do not seem to be able to do this with Windows 8 Is there any way this can be achieved?
I wish I had an answer, I'm with you. I noticed that because at least 50-75% of the time I reinstalled Windows versions in the past (from XP on) I would start the installation from within the previous one (if still working) in order to keep my drive letter assignments. Not a deal killer since I can normally reassign them after, but it made it easier, anyway.
Yes there is a way Instead of running setup.exe from the root of the installation dir, there is a setup.exe inside the 'sources' folder. run it from there and u can decide to which partition to install it to and it will keep your drive assignments
Backup your drive names \ numbering, and your shared folders. Then just run the reg after the install and reboot. Put this in a bat or cmd file. This works in Win7, i don't see why it wouldn't work in Win8. Code: @echo off REGEDIT /E "1_Drive_names_Backup.reg" "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices" REGEDIT /E "2_Shares_Backup.reg" "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares" thanks for the tip, superbubble.
Wrap 'em up in [\CODE][/\CODE] tags (remove the backslashes). Code: And enjoy your unformatted, monospaced results! :) Bonus edit for Halikus: You're welcome. Bonus bonus edit for Halikus: Tested and works on Windows Server 2012 RC.
There is a downside to installing this way. If the hard drive dies and you've imaged the partitions, upon restoration to a new hard drive, the non-C OS will likely be mucked, because the non-C drive letter will be entrenched throughout the OS that boots from non-C, yet because of the new hard drive, the the non-C OS will try to boot as C now. I've never found an easy way around this, including saving the drive assignments from the registry. That doesn't work because the replacement hard drive with have a new hardware identifier as recognized by OS like win7. I always install each MS OS as C now.
Tried it - did not work; ended up with Win8 installing itself on C:\ - which is NOT what I had selected. For now I can live with it but if the final does not include a real Custom install option then I will not move to Win8.