soimmore

Well, the main reason i want to do this is to circumvent the requirement that windows xp wants to be installed to a primary partition. That requirement causes significant problems for me. If anyone knows an alternate method of installing XP onto a logical partition, i would love to know

i was wondering if anyone had any experience with junction points, and in particular, how the windows installer handles them? usually, junction points are used to map one directory (or in my case, a partition) to another directory. I was wondering if i can use junction points on a root C:/ partition to point the /Windows directory onto another partition, say E:/. cheers

care to explain how you did it a little more in-depth? and also, how i would go about implementing this in an unattended install? thanks! soimmore

hey guys, i'm trying to install windows onto a logical partition somehow using an unattended install. i've noticed that windows will only install on a primary partition, and will nbot even attempt an install on a logical partition. I'm just curious, is there any way to carry this out at all? thanks, soimmore

@ T D Actually, you can, i think. the article i link to below describes being able to separate the system and boot partitions, and while the article doesn't say explicitly that you can keep the /WINDOWS on a logical partition, it feels implied by the article's tone. Also, the reason i'm doing this kind of partitioning scheme is because i desire to have my OS spread across several different points of failure, much like a Linux box. therefore, i'm trying to have the equivalent of a / , /root/, /usr, /tmp, /home, etc. (though in actuality there will only be four partitions, 1) the system partition which will have ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini, 2) the boot partition with the /WINDOWS information, and a junction point to the 3) Program Files dir which will be on another partition, and to the 4) Documents and Settings dir, which will also be on another partition. The way i accomplish this is with something called Junction Points, i don't know if you are familiar with them, but they are basically the equivalent of symbolic links in linux (directories that, in actuality, are just pointers to another directory, but are transparent to the OS) Anyway, all of this brings me to my main point, i want these last 3 partitions to be logical so that i can resize them as i please with Partition Magic, that way i can maximize the efficiency of space i have remaining. Also, I intend on sharing the partition with Documents and Settings with Linux using the EXT2FSD project, so in actuality, it will be an ext2 partition, but still readable/writable in windows. This accomplishes something very important to me: it gets rid of having multiple copies of the same file for my Linux and Windows OSes, since i dual-boot. So, now i can have all my music files on one partition, which is accessed by both of my OSes. So that's the short version, sorry if its a little unclear at times, just ask and i'll clear up whatever questions ya got http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470/ @ JuMz thanks for that link, it's helping me a little, now that i've found ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini, i can actually give this a whirl. i need to make some back ups, but that link was interesting. thanks. @ pmshah Are you sure? i once encountered a similar situation myself, but after i did some digging, i found that the installer had just created a partition of some free space i had intentionally left unformatted, and installed there (figures...). I thought i had something that was similar to what you describe, but it turned out to be two primary partitions, not one primary and one logical. I'm also curious if you used a customized installer, and if you did, do you have a link to a torrent or something? thanks man Cheers

Hi, i've been trying to come up with a way to install XP on a logical partition. However, i've found that i cannot install XP onto anything but a primary partition. My conclusion was to work around this by creating an about 8 mb primary partition that would just hold boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com, and then have the WINDOWS directory reside on a separate, logical partition. My main problem is manipulating the files, since i'm not really sure how exactly this works. Does anyone have any kind of guide, or any advice for me to follow that i can do this? Thanks in Advance