A few notes on Windows Technical Preview....

While all the re-arranging of the hard-drive was going on, and drive letters were being re-assigned, somehow or other, my Windows 7 partition got left without a drive letter assignment. It was just " :Win-7" with no letter before it.

Usually, in a case like that, I'd use Easeus Partition Master and EasyBCD to remedy the situation, but neither of those have quite the right selection of commands for this particular job. Guess what? Windows to the rescue! 

I didn't want to rename the drive, I just wanted to pick a new drive letter and assign it. The only program with everything needed to do that turns out to be the one I had here all along - Windows! How about that, critics? So here's where you find it....

Go into Control Panel, and choose Administrative Tools - Computer Management and then in the left margin, choose Disk Management, and you get a window like this:-

Highlight and right-click on the drive you want, and you get a dropdown with choices of what to do with it. Simple. Why didn't I think of that first? And then you can use Easeus to have a look and confirm you got the results you wanted.

And Peace returns to the valley!

"So what started all that?" you ask. It's a long story, and it begins when I first began testing the beta of Windows 7. This computer was the one I got for that little task, and when Windows 7 went RTM and we could buy it, then it became the original Boot system on this computer. It still is.  And of course, it deserves its own drive letter. Windows Technical Preview takes over the letter "C" as its drive letter during installation, because it becomes the boot operating system when it is installed. This is necessary, because it receives updates and upgrades through Windows Updates quite frequently, daily lately, and during some of that it needs to automatically reboot to continue the processes - so it needs to be in control of the Boot Sector, which it now is. But the actual location of my Boot Sector is in my original Windows 7 partition. And now I have three operating systems on here: Windows Technical Preview, Windows 7, and Windows 8.


And the good news? You can access files on any of those from any other using the system files tree in the left margin of File Explorer. It's like its own built-in HomeGroup, but with a lot less fuss. If you want to move files from one system to the other, simply get the two different windows on screen, side by side, using the Windows Key plus the right or left direction arrows, and then drag and drop to copy files or folders from one to the other. Nothing could be easier!

I used that yesterday, to get some programs working inside the Tech Preview quickly, while setting it up with my own icons, etc., but there's one problem with that: while the programs may work fine, doing it this way doesn't register them in the system to which you moved it, so the program doesn't show up on the Default Programs list in case you later wanted to make it your default for that kind of task. And not being registered in the new system, it also doesn't show in your Programs and Features list in Control Panel. So if you later want to remove it, you have to remove its folder from its location in Program Files. If it has any features that deny you access, then you need Igor's "MoveOnBoot" from Emco Software in Iceland. 

And Igor's program works like a charm because it does its thing during a Reboot while active memory is unloaded, and therefore it has access to all the usually protected system files and anything else that ordinarily denies you access.