2 Hard disks - 2 versions of Vista

by **JDGill** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 8:17 pm

Is it possible to have 2 versions of Vista installed on 2 hard disks and make it so that neither can see the other system partition?

I had Vista Business installed on the 1st hard disk and then installed Home Basic on the 2nd, both work OK and both show in the boot menu. Everything in the Business edition (installed first) is OK but from the Home Basic edition I can still the the Business partition as drive D:

As the Home Basic was intended for the kids to use I want the Business partition totally hidden. Disk Management in Home Basic won't let me remove the drive letter (or change the letter) as it says the disk is a system or paging disk and is required.

Any suggestions on how to hide the Business partition when in Home Basic would be most appreciated.

by **The Phoenix** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:34 am

Welcome to PROnetworks JDGill. Thats certainly an interesting problem, if you were in XP it would be easy, a simple download and install of a utility and you could hide any drive letter you saw fit but as to how to do this in Vista thats another question. Please bear with us a little while and give the other experrts here a chance to take a look at your problem, I am sure one of us will find a solution for you.

by **colsaunders2** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:55 am

What I would do is set the permissions for the limited user accounts in Vista Home to deny all access to the other partition - this would be a simple task in Business, but Home unfortunately does not include the user permissions editor (at least a graphical one). However, I found a utility that adds this functionality and claims to work with Vista: "XP Home Permissions Manager 2.0" - check that out if you like.

by **JDGill** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:12 pm

Thanks for the comments - I'll check out the utility suggested.

by **NT50** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 12:40 am

The problem with un assigning the drive letter is that disk is your system disk since it was the first Vista to be install. You boot manager files are on that drive and the MBR of that drive..

by **JDGill** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 8:22 am

NT50 wrote:The problem with un assigning the drive letter is that disk is your system disk since it was the first Vista to be install. You boot manager files are on that drive and the MBR of that drive..

Do any of the 3rd party boot managers get around this problem (BootIT NG, System Commander etc)? I be interested if anyone had first-hand experience of these.

As I understand it some of the programs can automatically hide other partitions.

by **NT50** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 12:34 pm

The 3rd party programs are not suitable with Vista (Yet)

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2 Hard disks - 2 versions of Vista

2 Hard disks - 2 versions of Vista

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