Windows machine with no C drive

I’m hoping someone here can help me with this… is it possible to have a Windows machine with one hard disk which it boots from, and have that drive show up as D:?

(The context is that we have a bunch of software that expects to run out of the C drive… we want to have multiple different configurations of that software, which scatters lots of stuff around various folders, that we can switch between. So the plan is to boot up on the D drive and have folders on D called d:\config1, d:\config2, etc. Then we can use “subst” to may d:\config1 as c:, and run for a while. Then when we want to switch to config2, we reboot, subst d:\config2 as c:, and so forth.)
Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks…

Not sure about the drives, but just wanted to say that this sounds like a great case for virtualization – if your hardware supports it.

Yeah, we’re considering that. But that might run into issues with graphic cards and so forth… so we’re hoping to arrive at some “virtualization-lite” type solution.

Do you really mean the boot drive (the drive with bootmgr) or the system drive (the drive with \windows)? There’s little restriction on the latter.

Regardless, Windows 7 supports hard links with the MKLINK command.

I’m not sure about Windows 7, but on previous versions of Windows the “boot volume” was the one with the OS on it, and the “system volume” was the one that you booted from! It’s so confusing that it’s actually easy to remember - just remember that it’s the exact opposite of what you would expect.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470

Well, MKLINK will certainly do what I want, if I can set up a system where both the boot drive and system drive are named “d:” instead of “c:”.