I've been holding off on getting a new laptop, but finally went for it - a Dell Inspiron 510m, excellent screen, big disk and lots of memory. And very nice it is to. Since the disk is big I'm going for 3 boot partitions: a stable one running .net 1.1, a .net 2.0 beta 1 partition, and a general test partition (for any other beta stuff that comes along), plus a large partition for data. I've isntalled the stable one and decided to clone it for the others to save some time. I've not used cloning software before, but decided to try Acronis TrueImage; it has a nice Copy Disc option. So it whirs away, I boot into the new partition, generate a new sid and everything looks fine.
However, I go to install VS.NET 2.0 and the default install directory is C:, which is my stable partition. I look at the environment variables and some of them point to C: still, as does almost everything with a full path that's stored in the registry. Hmm, not exactly what I had planned. This disc cloning is great if you don't want the new parition to have a different drive letter. So my options are:
- Rename the drives, so that the partition booted into is always C. It's not the way my old laptop was and might confuse me (which isn't that hard to be honest).
- Scratch the newly cloned paritions and just repave them as normal.
- Edit every path in the registry, which seems pretty desperate since there's no search and replace (for probably sensible reasons).
Views people? What have others done?
[update] Of course, option 1 isn't available as it's the system partition, and thus can't be renamed. Sigh.