Booting From An External HDD, 3 Partitions And 3 OS's?
Feb 16, 2013
I work with three kinds of computers. One is on my desktop, new windows 7, dual core, that I use for lesson planning. The second are the computers in the classrooms. I am guessing that they are all almost identical, xp purchased 4 years ago. The third is a server used in the computer lab. I would like to buy an external hd and partition it 3 ways - and install win 7 (english) while it is hooked up to my desktop, install xp (english) while it is hooked up to one of the classroom computers and then install another OS while it is hooked up to the server. I want to be able to connect the hd to the computer, power it on and choose either either partition d:, e: or f: depending on the computer it is hooked up to. I know that I can boot from an external hd but I have never tried putting 3 OS, one to each partition, on an external HD.
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Dec 24, 2010
i am dual booting 7 64 bit and ubuntu linux,i was wondering if anyone has any issues with this type of setup or just with partitions in general
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Jul 21, 2011
So what I do now is:1) Delete "DosDevicesC:" in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMMountedDevices" and some other DosDevices that will have an other letter booting the clone.2) Using the free MiniTool from partitionwizard.com, I delete a partition I don't need anymore and clone the one running in it. PS: PartitionWizard will reboot and clone it unless I copy an other not active partition (previous clone) which can not have been booted yet so "DosDevicesC:" is still absent.3) Now I need to run "bcdboot f:windows /s f:" in a cmd/dos-window or batchfilewhere "f:" is the new created clone. Or use EasyBCD.4) Then I also use the free version of boot-us.com to be able to hide and protect the other not needed clones or original partition when booting and using a clone.
So I don't really need the BCD bootmanager from Windows 7. It gives only more things do to to prepare the cloned partition. I even don't need the "DosDevicesC:" in the registry, because I need to take it out before cloning. Is there a way to skip or delete the BCD and boot into the only not hidden active partition called C:, which will have any other serialnumber?Is there a way to keep "DosDevicesC:" out of the registry or change it after making a clone-copy. Maybe be able to change the registry from a non active partition with a simple batchfile. Or maybe even have "DosDevicesC:" be deleted everytime when windows is booting before it is automaticly been rewritten into the registry with the active partition?
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Nov 14, 2012
I've just experienced my 'external hard drive' not letting me access any data. I put 'external hard drive' in apostrophes, as it's actually an old SATA Internal Hard drive, in an external case.The hard drive was partitioned into two partitions. One about 100GB large which had Windows 7 installed on it, from when I used it inside my desktop. Another which was encrypted with TrueCrypt and was about 800GB large. I tried loading the second partition with Truecrypt, but the computer locked up. In the end I had to turn off the computer manually by the power.I booted up and I couldn't see the hard drives at all - not even in Computer Management. I turned the HD power on and off a couple times and eventually they were viewable - only they'd turned into three partitions, with an extra 24GB partition as the active, primary partition. It might've been that way before but not viewable in My Computer. Now I can see the sizes of the partition in Computer Management, but they show as 0MB in My Computer, as if I'd not formatted them. When I try open them in My Computer though, it lets me open them - it doesn't tell me they need formatting.I'm currently running TestDisk, but it can only see the 24GB partition. how I can recover my data?
Edit: TestDisk Results: No Recoverable Partition Found.Also noticed file system now says RAW.
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Aug 15, 2012
I don't know what happen, but im having problems with my external hard drive. I have 3 partition in it, but only the first one is detecting, the other two doesn't appear at all then a sign pops up saying i have to format it, i hit cancel and all 3 drives disappear. seems like hard drive failure. I have a lot of important data on the other drives, is there any way to recover it myself? I really don't want to pay 500+ dollars to recover the data off the drive.
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Sep 24, 2010
I'm having a problem not being able to access 2 out of 3 partitions in an external HD.
Samsung HD753LJ (USB) 700GB
Partition 1: 200 GB / NTFS
Partition 2: 200 GB / NTFS
Partition 3: 300 GB / NTFS
I once had a dual-boot Windows XP Professional SP3 and Windows 7 Professional. Partition 1 could be accessed from both OS, but Windows 7 could not and still cannot 'see' Partitions 2 and 3. While it was still a dual-boot, switching back and forth between the systems was the only way I could access the data in Partitions 2&3 from Windows XP. Now that I have a clean install of Windows 7 only, (stupid me to have forgotten this problem) I cannot access the files at all. I have tried restarting the system, reinstalling the HD driver, replugging the HD, and the problem still persists. What I have managed so far:
> Under 'Device Manager'
>> No warning. All drivers are updated.
> Under 'My Computer'
>> Only Partition 1 is listed and accessible
> Under 'Computer Management' > 'Disk Management'
>> All three partitions are in the disk's table. The 2nd and 3rd partitions are listed with blue bars, total space allocated and no other information. An attempt to get Properties or assign drive letters produces an error message "... Disk Managaement control view is not up-to-date ... ".
> Under 'partdisk'
>> 'list disk' shows correctly sized Disk at 700 GB
>> 'list volume' shows only up to Partition 1 of the external HD.
>> After selecting the external HD, 'list partition' shows all 3 partitions with correct sizes and offsets.
> With MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition
Disk 1_______
G: Partition 1
*: Partition 2
*: Partition 3
>> All 3 partitions can be explored (whew ...)
>> The two 'missing' partitions were not hidden.
>> However, when assigning the drive letters to the partitions, the drive letters only stay in front of the partitions' names until I clicked Apply. After which, the asterisks came back again. (I haven't found any way to assign the drive letter in Partition Wizard Bootable CD
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Jul 29, 2011
My external hard drives partitions are hidden in windows 7
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Dec 9, 2011
I have Asus N55SF laptop, with Windows 7 SP1 64 bit. Also, I have 2 external hard drives. One with USB 3.0, and one USB 2.0. Following problems, I am going to describe below, happen to the both of them. Just to mention, external drives are tested on desktop computer and following problems do not happen.
Let me now describe what happens when I try certain actions:
- When I try to copy large files (10 or more GB) I get an error that destination is no longer visible. External drives disappear from My Computer and I can't do safe remove. But when I copy files using programs FastCopy or TeraCopy everything copies well and drives do not disappear.
- When I try to do Windows Backup and encrypt them using BitLocker drives also disappear, and are not visible within OS.
There is a difference between external hard with USB 3.0 port and the one with 2.0 port:
- When one with 3.0 disappears after described actions I can't see it from Device Manager, I can see it only after windows reboot. USB 3.0 disk connects to one USB 3.0 port on laptop.
- When one with 2.0 port disappears I can see it from Device Manager, and I only have to unplug it, and plug it in again to see it. USB 2.0 disk connects to 2 USB 2.0 ports on laptop.
Common to both disks is that when then disappear from My computer the diode on the external disk cases are still flashing, what probably means that they have some power. Both disk are formated to NTFS, and Allocation unit size is set to: Default. Their removal policy is set to: Better performance (default). On laptop I only have Windows, Office and Asus drivers. Antivirus is: MSE.
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Apr 16, 2012
A few weeks ago my old Lenovo computer died. I took the HD out and it worked OK in another computer. I then bought a new HP with Windows 7 64 bit. Everything fine except lazy greedy Canon do not produce drivers for my existing scanner for 64 bit, only 32 bit. I have wasted a lot of time trying other drivers, work arounds and expensive memory hogging simulation programs. Howvere, I saw a case I can put my old HD into in a shop the other day. What I am wondering now is if it is possible to do this, plug in it and then boot my old system on those occasions I need to use my scanner?
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Dec 21, 2011
My internal HDD may be about to fail and I want to back it up to an external HDD. Question is, will I be able to boot from the external HDD?
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Mar 5, 2012
Motherboard: Asus A8N5X
So after the hard drive fiasco that I reported in another thread, I got clever and decided to create an "Emergency Boot Drive" that would have Windows on it as well as some utilities for data recovery. I took one of the many old hard drives that I have floating around and plugged it into the computer AND unplugged my other two drives. Then I ran Windows Install off the DVD and installed Windows to the old drive. I installed my software. All was good. I plugged in the other two drives and tried to boot from the "Emergency" drive and it worked fine.Last step was to unplug the emergency drive from the motherboard, connect it via USB and try to boot. The BIOS sees the drive and I tell it to boot from the drive. So the computer is booting. The "Starting Windows" message comes up and then the system reboots. This happens everytime I try it.Does Windows reset the USB ports so that the drive suddenly vanishes?
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Nov 8, 2012
It just shows the blue colour only but not recognized by laptop
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Jul 27, 2010
I am dual booting windows 7 and ubuntu 10.04 on a hp dv4 1162 tx laptop and have it plugged into a Benq monitor. That is the only monitor that i use and don't do any dual monitor things.
My dilemma is that this monitor does not show any of the boot screens and that means that i cannot choose which os to boot into. How can i make it show them.
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Apr 16, 2012
I am trying to boot windows server installed in external hard disk from my windows 7 pc but when I am trying to do so it my pc is flashing blue screen and my pc reboots with win 7.
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Jan 5, 2010
I am trying to wipe my current XP installation clean and move on to Windows 7.
I first tried to install the setup.exe (Custom install option of course) from within the XP OS, but soon discovered you cannot do that and wipe out my only partition on C: at the same time.
I don't have a DVD-RW drive to write a boot disk, so instead I am trying to install through my external hard drive. I meticulously followed this tutorial from PC World yet when I instruct the PC in BIOS to boot from the external hard drive, I keep getting an "invalid system disk, press any key" error when the computer boots and looks for the setup files. This is despite the fact that setup seems to work perfectly from within the XP OS.
PC World tutorial:
Install Windows 7 From an External Hard Drive - PC World
Can anyone please offer me any helpful advice to get the external hard drive setup to work or help me find a way to install 7 from within XP?
Anyone know exactly why I keep getting the "invalid disk" error each time when I try to boot from my external hard drive? As mentioned in the PC World tutorial, I marked the external hard drive as an active partition and the setup files seem to work fine from within XP. If it helps, in the external hard drive root folder is both the Windows 7 ISO and all the files contained (which I extracted using PowerISO).
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Dec 9, 2012
One of my friends has a windows 7 computer with an account for himself, his mother and his 2 sisters. All the home directorys are stored in drive C. Partition D is shared. The question is, how to get a partition layout like this?
Partition 1: OS + programs
Partition 2: home partition for himself
Partition 3: home partition for his mother
Partition 4: home partition for his sister
Partition 5: home partition for his other sister
Partition 6: shared partition for some photos.
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Jun 19, 2012
Earlier xp but after win7 the booting not show xp at booting time
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Feb 24, 2012
How to get output on external speaker by using external microphone via laptop.(window 7,xp and vista)
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Apr 24, 2012
I am thinking of replacing my old Dell using XP, with a modern one. I partitioned the old one so the OS & programs were on one partition & documents on the other. I suppose this will not be necessary with the large hard drives available now? I don't foresee having any problems backing up the documents. What do others think?
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May 25, 2012
I have two physical HDs in one of my machines. The first is C. The second physical HD has two partitions, which are D and E. This drive has failed, and I took a HD from another machine, and added it to this one we are talking about. Windows 7 sees this HD as D, because unlike the one that failed, this "new" one was originally formatted with only one partition. I would like to get Windows 7 to see this HD as D and E (and transfer files as necessary), so when I load my music template from my sequencer, it will find all of the necessary audio files.
If the second HD is only D, the template is not going to be able to find all of the files automatically, even if they are physically on the D drive - this is b/c the sequencer is looking for some of the files on E, which doesn't exist. I can browse for, and point to the the files on D, but it gets to be a PITA if I have to open eny old templates or projects. So, what I would like to do is somehow get Windows to see that second HD as D and E, instead of just D. Is there any trick that I can do to make this happen? Trying to avoid having to reformat.
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Aug 26, 2011
I just partitioned my C drive and now have an I: drive that I use for data, music and movies and such.My question is this: if I have to do a system recovery. Will I lose that partition? Or will Windows 7 re-install on the C: drive without touching that partition?
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Feb 2, 2012
This is a 1TB HD with Win 7 pre-installed on a 100GB partition (C and a remaining 809GB or 811GB depending on what I use to look at it on a second partition, I would like to partition the remaining 811GB (D however I ran into a confusing snag. Even though Windows shows only 2 partitions,when I run my partition manager it shows that there are 4 partitions, 100MiB NTFS, 101GiB NTFS, (extended) 809.65GiB,sda5 809.65GiB NTFS.
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Feb 25, 2011
.I originaly partitioned my hard drive and I dual boot with XP and 7.I would like to know how to merge the two partitions back and just use Windows7.Just remember that you are not dealing with a rocket scientest here,hope to make it as easy as possible.
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Aug 17, 2012
why i chose 2 partitions, i thought it could help me organize my stuff better.Now all my stuff is on OS C: Since it's split into two there is less space available..it's screwing with some of my programs that depend on each other.
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Apr 4, 2012
I have a 320GB Seagate Hard Drive. It has 2 partitions and I used 1 for projects and recordings, and the other for backup. Now I have a WD Caviar Blue 500GB that I plan to use for projects and recordings. Is it possible to backup to both partitions on the Seagate hard drive? Someone on OCN told me that you can't already do it with native Windows backup.
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Oct 16, 2010
I want to merge two partitions, D: (doens't contain nothing) with F: (my partition of backup, contain many files).But, is there any problem if the partition D: is on the left side of the F:? It's possible to do this with the Disk Management in Seven?
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Jun 11, 2012
What is the policy for Removable USB Drives in Windows? Does it only recognize the first partition? Is there any difference between FAT32 and NTFS? I am asking because time to time, I am not able to see the partitions in Windows, and I wanted to learn about its policy (rules I mean) about Removable USB Drives (What I mean is Flash drives I guess, when the USB Drives are connected; it is not showing up in the drivers, but in Removable Devices).
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Sep 7, 2012
is it possible to merge these 2 partitions together? F into D? installed RAM is 4GB(2.99GB useable) <- can somebody explain to me what does this means? does another 1.01GB is wasted?
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Nov 16, 2009
After discovering Speccy, I saw this and now I'm curious. Do I have one hard drive that was shrunk to have two 70 GB partitions or do I have two hard drives? If they are two partitions, can I merge them(formatting XP)?
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Nov 26, 2009
I decided to delete my recovery partition since I can't burn them to disks because I don't have the appropriate program. So now, I have 10.88GB of unallocated space that I want to merge with Partition (C). How do I do this?
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Nov 30, 2009
Because of recent problem while trying out Ubuntu, I had to partition my harddrive
My hd capacity - 500 gb
C: - 48.8gb - Windows 7 OS + programme files
D: - 416gb - Storage memory - nothing so important
Total - 464.8 [could this be 500gb in marketing terms?]
I would be more happier if I could have a single hd with Full ~500gb in it
Could anyone help me doing this - even if it takes to format the WHOLE hdd, I am ok
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