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boot os drive letter

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boot os drive letter

Postby trainspotters » Thu Apr 30, 2009 4:53 pm

Back in the PartitionMagic days, a dual boot system (Win95/Win98) would automatically hide the non-booted partition so that the booted OS would always be the c drive. When software was installed, all defaults could be followed, and the non-booted OS was hidden, Is there a way to do this with XP/Vista? With XP first, then installing Vista, I get a good dual boot selection, but the Vista drive is K (I have card reader slots) and when booting to Vista, it is necessary to change the default drive from C to K each time. This is particularly troublesome when unzipping. I do not want any Vista stuff to affect my XP partition, so shouldn't it be hidden and Vista changed to C?
Thanks for any help.
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Re: boot os drive letter

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Apr 30, 2009 5:11 pm

If you install XP to drive C and then install Vista to any drive letter, by booting to the Vista DVD to run setup, XP will see itself as being on C when you boot to it, and Vista will see itself as being on drive C when you boot to it.

Installing Vista by running setup from within Windows XP will result in Vista taking on the same drive lettering as XP and Vista will no longer see itself as being installed on drive C.

Vista uses "virtual drive lettering" which results in a totally different drive lettering to that of XP. I have no idea why MS has done this as apart from the benefit of Vista always seeing itself as being on drive C as I described above, it causes quite a few issues in my opinion.

Another mean idiosyncrasy of Windows is that Disk Management from within Windows (XP and Vista) seldom bears any relationship at all to diskpart that Windows setup uses...it's also a mystery as to why MS would do such a thing :-?

Not much help I'm afraid but maybe just a little bit more insight into the weird world of windows :lol:
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