drive letter prob in dual boot of XP & Vista x64

[mehargags]

Hi friends,

I have 5 partitions on a Terabyte Hard Drive:

1. C: boot partition holding XP MCE 32bit

2. D: Data and software

3. E: Songs and movies

4. G: Games installed

5. V: proposed for Vista, its last partition on the drive

Now the problem in detail. I want to dual boot normal 32bit XP Media Centre Edition with Vista x64. But since I cannot run x64 setup from within XP, I have to start the Vista x64 installation from bootable DVD. But when installing from DVD, it re-assigns all drive letters afresh as per their physical occurrence on the Hard Drive. What it will do is:

1. D boot partition holding XP MCE 32bit

2. E: Data and software

3. F: Songs and movies

4. G: Games installed

5. C: Vista x64 installed, last partition on the drive

So it tends to assign System partition the Drive letter as C: and as you know the disk management doesn’t allow you to change drive letter of your System as well boot partition which is Partition 1 and 5. So I’m stuck with V: being C: and actual C: being D: in Vista x64. Rest of the partitions can be assigned any Driver letter desired.

Is there any way, some answer file, some other workaround so that I can supply partition information to Vista x64 during install time so that it lets me have the drive letters assigned same as XP32bit ??

I’m desperately looking for a solution to this.

Thx & Regards

[fizban2]

why do the letters have to be the same? the volumes are marked are they not? once you log back into XP the drive letters will be the same as they were before. the drive lettering is done by each OS independently.

[jaclaz]

It is possible (but cannot really say ) that Vista and (maybe also) Vista64 still relies on the migrate.inf file.

It's a loooong shot, though.

Do check this seemingly unrelated post:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Installation-end...ve-t112923.html

and links therein

However, since you are going to reinstall VISTA anyway, I would try using a PE of some kind or even good ol' DOS and change the entries in the partition tables, in the MBR and in the EPBR to make the partitions "hidden" (simply changing first hex number of partition type from "0" to "1"):

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html

Another possibility is that rather than in the order the partition is phisycally on the hard drive, Vista setup looks at the order in which partitions are listed in the MBR and EPBR, in this case exchanging the orfer of the entries may get the desiref result.

jaclaz

[arfett]

Fizban is right. Each partition is just arbitrarily (not really arbitrary, but for your uses it is) assigned a drive letter by the OS. If you don't like the order vista puts them in then once you boot into vista open the disk management app from administrator tools and change the drive letter of the partitions. This will not affect how XP reads the drives.

[jaclaz]

@fizban

@arfett

I guess that what mehargags asked for is a way to have the SAME drive lettering WHATEVER system is currently booted.

This is VERY recommended, as one time or another, you will just forget in which system you are currently booted and save a file in the wrong drive, possibly overwriting a different version of a file:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Problem-drive-letters-t25127.html

Surely he can change letters to "other" drives, but changing Boot and System one is tricky.

@mehargags

See this also:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Dirver-letters-W...ion-t53177.html

Cannot say whether Vista uses some strange ways, you should also check this site:

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/

jaclaz

[jrf2027]

Just to add in my two cents...

From what I've seen, whatever drive Vista is installed on becomes the C: drive in Vista. It's easier to go with the system rather than fight it...

For dual-booting, I've found it more convenient to keep all user data (Documents, Music, Pictures, Favorites, Downloads) on a partition completely separate from either Windows installation. That way, you can remap the drives however you want using disk management. You can use TweakUI in XP to tell it where your relocated folders are, and Vista's special folders are very easy to relocate - just edit their location in Explorer.

If you're interested in being able to boot each OS independently, with its own bootloader intact, and keep all your drive assignments the same, read on...

I've been successfully using GRUB (via a small Ubuntu partition) to dual-boot XP and Vista independent of each other. GRUB allows you the flexibility of hiding partitions and making partitions active on the fly. In this manner, I have all drives marked the exact same in both XP and Vista:

I have my boot 320 GB (actually 298 GB) hard drive partitioned as follows:

Partition 1 - XP C:, 160 GB

Partition 2 - Vista C:, 120 GB

Partition 3 - rest of drive, about 18 GB, set up as an extended partition, divided into two logical partitions - one for Linux swap, the other for Ubuntu.

The remainder of the drives on my system are as follows:

500 GB hard drive, one contiguous partition (D:)

DVD-RW (E:)

DVD-RW (F:)

Flash 4GB (G:)

Flash 8GB (H:)

Card reader (shows up as four drives, I've remapped them as P:, R:, S: and T:)

By using GRUB, when booting into XP you can make the XP partition active and hide the Vista partition on the fly. You can also make the Vista partition active and hide the XP partition when booting into Vista. Plus, all my drives are the same in both Vista and XP. Of course, you do lose the ability to access your other Windows drive...which should not be a big deal if you have your data folders saved on a partition accessible from both installations. Plus, this way XP won't be able to see Vista, and Vista won't be able to see XP, meaning they can't muck each other up.

It's a little tricky to get set up, but this guide helped me out (make sure to read my post at the end):

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=150551

Edited February 21, 2008 by jrf2027

[jaclaz]

@jrf2027

FYI, you can well try grub4dos, that can reside on NTFS partitions as well:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/Grub4dos-f66.html

grub4dos has a number of added features, specific to MS based systems, DOS and NT.

jaclaz

[phxwings]

hi buddy i got an idea :

I once saw a article .

you can change the XP ISO's install files and make it install into the path c:\xp\

then install Vista into partition C:

please search the detail , I hope this can do something helped .