Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations
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Please start your own topic for support with problems you experience. Even if it appears to be exactly the same as someone else's problem, system configurations differ significantly. Thank you.
It may take our support staff between 24-48 hours to respond to your problem. We are a small business and strive to answer your questions as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience.
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Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations
I just got an Intel X24-M 80GB SSD for booting XPSP3 and Win 7 faster, and it looks like the hardware works fine. Here's my situation: I want to have duplicates (clones) of XP and 7 on the SSD.
My system was initially a two-drive one where the first, older 40Gb Maxtor IDE drive has two partitions, and the first is System|Active|Primary, starting out as C: that has the BCD, and is formatted to FAT32, since I have an old 98SE installation there to edit a MIDI module's hardware with an old 98SE app that won't run under XP or 7. So, if I want SE, I F8 during XP startup, select 98 SE, and XP does its old sleight of hand with BOOTSECT.DOS, which then loads IO.SYS & starts DOS, and the usual stuff after that to start SE. It's of course oblivious to the NTFS volumes such as its own D: drive, but I can work with the MIDI module when I want.
The second drive is a SATA unit whose first two partitions have no OSes, but the third has XPSP3 (E:), and the fourth Win 7 (F:), both of which start up flawlessly from the BCD multiboot menu with system drives relettered to C:, D:, E: and F:, and the old IDE drives' C: & D: partitions becoming H: & I:.
So, I wanted to multiboot XP and 7 from the new SSD, made four partitions on it, and copied the SATA drive's C:, D:, E: and F: partitions to corresponding partitions on the SSD, N: through Q;, that are clones of C: through F:; but, of course, neither XPSP3 nor Win 7 will start from P: or Q:, since the copied O/Ses' Registries reference E: and F:, respectively. Windows will not allow me to do a system image of 7 because of I: (old C:) being FAT32, which it has to be in order for 98SE to start there, that OS being NTFS-ignorant, right?
I copied E: and F: over to P: and Q: with EASUS Partition Manager, which worked great, but now Win 7 gives black screen with error messages when I try to start that OS there using the new entry, even though I specified in DualBoot Pro to boot the O/S from Q:. Is there a way I can get the N: through Q: installations to reletter as C: through F:, and reletter C: through F: to N: through Q: while running the XPSP3 or Win 7 installations copied to the SSD? Or is what I want to do nonsensical? Seems that something does the relettering of boot-time C: and D: to I: and H:. I don't want to have to reinstall everything to the SSD from the plastic media, for I'll lose my settings & tweaks, etc.
I hear people going <GROOOAAN!!!!>... I'll bet what I want to do might be pretty simple to implement for a multiboot guru. If I need to re-think what I'm doing, tell me. I'm pretty technically competent. Thanks!!
Re: Drive letters & cloned WIN 7/XP installations
Moved - more people will see your post here thus get more responses.
I never tried a SSD drive.
Where does Win98 SE fit in the mix above?
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