I'm pretty sure I may have seen a solution to this somewhere else but in spite of searching have not been able to find it.

I have implemented W7 on a seperate hard drive from my XP install. W7 is running just fine. However, within W7 I cannot see the other hard drive (I thought I might be able to access various documents from there). W7 regards the drive on which it is installed as C:

In XP from within explorer I can see the hard drive onto which W7 is installed and has it designated as F: (I had installed my 2 DVD drives before installing the hard drive). From within XP I can drill down a number of folder levels of W7 but cannot open any files in there. XP regards the drive it is installed on as C:

Is there a way I can access the files on the XP drive from W7? And is the fact that each OS regards the disk on which it is installed as C: likely to cause a problem as I try to access one from the other?

Many thanks,

Mike

Edit: Almost as soon as I posted this I found another forum with the answer. For those with the same problem, try this - Link to solution

Edited January 15, 200917 yr by groovydad

Right click COMPUTER -> Manage -> Storage -> Disk Management. In the right panel you see your drives. Right click the new drive -> add letter or change path. Choose a letter for your new drive.

Thank you for this. I had found the solution 5 minutes after posting; should prolly have added a reply rather than edit.

Now I find explorer hanging when searching for files on the XP drive - getting 94% memory utilisation. I'm sorely tempted to move everything over to W7 anyway but it's just the hassle of moving back to XP in summer that puts me off.

All the best,

Mike

The release candidate is likely to be out this summer, before August 1st when the beta shuts down, so moving to Win7 (assuming you don't mind reinstalling the RC this summer, and again with RTM once it hits the retail channel) shouldn't be dangerous on that front. I've actually moved my main home and dev machines to Win7 7000, and two of my workstations as well.

I do not regret the decision.

wzor (dubious Russian site, which has good sources) writes the RC will be out in April

use disk management to set drive letter to it