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Why does Windows touch hidden partitions?


UCyborg

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Windows XP has the decency to not touch the partition if it was marked as hidden.

But if you boot Windows 7 or really any OS past XP, and it encounters the partition with another hibernated Windows, which was marked as hidden (ID 0x17 instead of 0x7) prior to booting the other Windows OS, that other Windows OS (assuming it's newer than XP) will do something to it so when you wake-up the hibernated OS, it'll detect inconsistencies in the file system and bug you to reboot to run the chkdsk.

Why does it do that? What's the point of having the hidden flag then? But give the partition some stupid ID and then it will leave it alone.

Or maybe XP just considers the ID 0x17 as invalid and ignores it, making it seem nicer, while it might behave just like newer versions otherwise? Maybe they just compared the ID to 0x7 back then by testing for equality, rather than testing for both NTFS bit and the hidden bit and handling them both, with one practical difference in the case of hidden bit set being that the partition is not shown to the user and applications as the logical drive with assigned letter, but the OS still doing things behind the scenes as in the case of visible partition.

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