Vista / 7100 RC Dual Boot Drive Letter Problem
Jun 23, 2009
I originally was running Windows Vista x64 as my sole operating system. When the Windows 7 beta came out, I created a new partition and began dual-booting. I have been using that beta as my primary OS for several months, I think, keeping the other drive and the dual boot capability. I can't remember for sure, since I have blank DVDs but can't find a Windows 7 beta DVD, but I -think- that my method of installing the Windows 7 beta was as follows:
1. Mount Windows 7 beta ISO with Daemon Tools Lite
2. Run the setup program from it (or maybe I extracted the ISO to a directory and then ran the setup)
3. Install Windows 7 to the D: partition that I had created, while running Vista
4. The beta automatically configured dual boot. If I booted Vista, Vista viewed "itself" as drive C, and Windows 7 as something like drive D. If I booted Windows 7, it viewed "itself" as drive C, and Windows Vista as drive E. This was perfect.
I've been putting off installing the RC due to being busy/lazy, but I finally tried doing it over the weekend. I have tried four times, and all four have met with the same fate. The dual-boot configuration that gets generated looks right. Windows Vista boots viewing "itself" as drive C, and 7 as drive D. Windows 7, however, views "itself" as drive D, and Windows Vista as drive C.
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Oct 18, 2009
In 7 everything is all right.7 is c: and the boot partition is hidden.
But in XP the hidden partition is c: and visible.XP is d:,so some programs use default dir can't work.I tried disk management to change xp to c: but didn't succeed.
Anyway to change the drive letters and hide the 100m partition?
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Dec 3, 2009
My goal is to run a Windows 7/Windows 7 dual boot system with one installation for day to day operations (MAIN) and then second installation strictly for gaming (GAMER).
I have successfully installed Windows 7 twice. During clean install i created 30GB partition (C: ) and put MAIN there. No problems. I loaded that up and from within Disk Management created a second partition on the same physical drive and named it (D: ).
I booted from the Windows 7 install DVD and then installed GAMER to the (D: ) partition. No problems. I am able to boot into each installation (MAIN and GAMER) from the boot manager without any troubles.
When I boot into the MAIN installation, the system path/partition is (C: ) and the os files for the second installation, GAMER, can be seen on (D: ) just fine.
However, when i boot into the GAMER installation, its system path is also (C: ) and the partition for MAIN somehow got renamed to (G: )
I would like it so that when I boot into MAIN (which was installed to C: ), that partition stays named (C: ) and when i boot into GAMER (which was installed to D: ), that partition stays named (D: ). Eventhough both installations see themselves as (C: ) when i boot into them, it does not seem to cause any problems.
So how should I do my second Windows 7 installation to a partition named (D: ) and force it to keep that name when i boot into it?
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Apr 29, 2011
I'm using multiple hard drives to install both fedora and Windows 7. I've followed this online tutorial exactly: Dual-booting Fedora 14 and Windows 7 on a computer with 2 hard drives
The problem I seem to be facing is on the "Add a new Entry Step". His secondary OS partition has a drive letter assigned to it and I do not. I've gone into computer management and have tried to assign a drive letter to either of my secondary OS's hard drive partitions and it will not let me.
All I need is the boot loader to link to my second hard drive when the second option (OS) is chosen.
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Nov 10, 2009
I have windows XP pro 32 bit installed in C drive and then installed clean win 7 64bit in drive D. Everything works properly but when I boot from XP, it is in C drive and I see Windows 7 in D drive, when I boot from Windows 7, I see win 7 in C and winXP in D drive. Is it normal or is there any I can do to fix win Xp in C and Windows 7 in D?
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Aug 15, 2012
My system dual boots to either Windows 7 or Vista Ultimate, or, at least it is supposed to. Something happened and now the system just boots to Winodows 7 without giving me the choice to boot to either. When I use F6 I find that only Windows 7 is listed in the Operating Systems box.
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Sep 13, 2010
New laptop has Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. I have two business programs that won't run on a 64bit system. Partitioned the hard drive to install Vista Home Premium 32bit to create a dual boot system solely to run these two programs.Can't get Vista to load. Followed tutorial meticulously. All goes fine until the "Vista will boot for the first time" step. After this first boot, the screen returns to the "completing installation" page. However, the process dies here and the progress bar across the bottom of the screen never moves, even after an hour. Reformatted the partition and started over with same results. Multiple attempts always die after the first boot.
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Sep 13, 2012
I have two drives (C and D) with Vista on one and Win 7 on the other (not sure if they're actual drives or partitions of a single drive, how do I tell?). I am dual booting and never use Vista. Starting to need the disk space and want to delete Vista. Is this difficult in this scenario?
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Apr 5, 2011
I had recently installed windows 7 on my laptop running windows vista. I did not remove the existing windows vista installation, and thus win 7 was installed in a dual boot combination. Now, i want to remove vista from my laptop and use windows 7 only.The problem is that during installation, win 7 was installed on logical drive and windows vista was on the primary drive. Thus, i cannot delete/format the windows vista partition. Also I cannot transfer the boot drive to the partition containing win 7 because the vista partition is the active one.
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Oct 11, 2009
I have dualboot XP SP3 and Vista Ultimate on my system,,and now i want to install Windows 7 over the XP OS. I wish to keep Vista with Windows 7 without reinstalling Vista.
Can I just install Windows 7 over XP , or should i be careful for MBR,or boot....
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Jul 10, 2012
I recently built my computer and installed a ssd and a hdd, the OS is on the ssd which is the c drive but since it is smaller than the hdd I tried to change the letters around and make the hdd the c drive using regedit because the default install location seems to be the c drive and after restarting the computer it boots up and says preparing your desktop then goes to a blue screen with just the cursor. I tried booting in safe mode and all I get there is a black screen also
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Sep 24, 2012
I want to change the drive letter of the drive on which Windows 7 is installed.It is currently F:, and I want to change it to K:It is not possible from the Disk Management as I tried.
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Nov 9, 2010
my boot drive leter. recently bought a ssd installed my edition of win7pro 64 onto it no problems except i had my old hdd still plugged in which was my c drive letter ,thus i installed operating system onto my ssd with an e drive letter.ok so i have tried to run a couple of programmes which i use which have failed because the programme is looking for a specific file in c boot directory which i obviously havent got....hope you can understand what im getting at.so big question how do i change my ssd boot drive letter to :c and that all my existing programmes will still work.
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Oct 14, 2009
I installed Windows 7 on a partitioned harddrive with vista on the other half. After the installation i have my boot menu with:Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows vista still works but when i try and load windows 7 i get a boot error message
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Jul 25, 2009
I deleted my existing OS then created two new partitions on the same drive. Then I installed Vista on one partition and that partition was properly named "c" as ususal. Then I started Windows 7 setup.exe from a different hard drive and let Windows 7 install itself into its own partition. When I got to "My Computer" the Windows 7 partition was labelled as "I" instead of the expected "C" which had never happend before when I did the same thing.
Does anyone know a save way to label the Win 7 drive as "C" while in Windows 7?
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Apr 3, 2012
I'm not sure what the trigger was but my C drive where my os is installed apparently took the drive letter of an external drive that I use for backup. It is now the X drive and I cannot boot. I do get the repair screen but cannot repair as there is no operating system to choose. Booting from windows disk makes no difference here.My bios (uefi) can see the disk, I can also see it from the command prompt?
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Jan 25, 2009
I seem to be having a right trauma with this lol. I originally had Vista installed. Then i installed 7 to another HDD and that worked fine. I could choose between the OS. Now, i want to get rid of vista and use 7 solely. Easy i thought. Remove the boot entry and format the partition. Thats where it went horrilby wrong
Upon reboot i got the dreaded BOOTMGR missing file do'h
Anyway long story short i manged to system restore and fixmbr to boot back into 7 (phew)
Now can anyone tell me of a way that i can ditch vista without the headache of this.
ive attached a screen shot of how things are layed out.
Plus can anyone recommend a good imaging program that i could use just in-case my tinkering leads to something i cant repair.
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Nov 13, 2009
I've something going on in my PC with 3 partitions. I have one called C:/ where I have Windows Vista 32-bit (x86) installed, other called S:/ which is empty and the last one is N:/ where I have all my files like images, music, videos, etc... (wisely done so when I need to re-install OS, don't waste time burning all that files on dvd).
Since I got one partition empty (S:/), I decided to give Windows 7 a try. Being a TechNet Plus subscriber, allowed me to get a free copy of Windows 7, which I downloaded and it was saved on C:/ partition.
I know that's stupid and I've been slapping myself because of that but, I went to the downloaded files and hit twice on setup.exe. This means I didn't burned the .iso to a DVD
Seven was sucessfully installed. After playing around with new features and graphics, I installed some Windows Updates and rebooted for the first time (since I installed it).
DAMN, here starts the problem because when booting up, appeared the message on black screen saying "BOOTMGR IS COMPRESSED. HIT CTRL+ALT+DEL TO REBOOT". I totally forgot that my S:/ partition was compressed! And we all know that an OS partition should never be compressed. And then I slapped myself again.
The weird thing is that I couldn't boot in Windows Vista, I hadn't that option. Since I didn't burned Windows 7 to a DVD (*slapping me again*) and I couldn't start in Vista, I had to insert a modified Vista DVD by Toshiba (that came with PC when I bought it), this means that I don't have the repair option, I'm only able to format and re-install OS (and that sucks!), ..., and now it is fixed, that "bootmgr is compressed" message is gone which allowed me to boot to WinVista but where's dual boot??!
First thing I done when I got Vista back was uncompressing S:/ partition. Then I went to msconfig, but there is only one OS in Boot tab - Windows Vista. Once C:/ partition was formatted, and Windows 7 Setup was saved there, I lost those files, I need to download them again. But it is already installed, so there has to be a way to fix this. The problem is that I can't load Windows 7, I don't have that option while booting...
Anyone knows how to fix this?
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Mar 10, 2009
I installed Seven Beta on a dedicated partition in my laptop so that now my hard disk has the following partitions:
C=VistaOS default OEM Operating System
D=Data for documents, pictures, etc.
E=SevenOS Seven Beta
This is when I read my HD from Vista, but from inside Seven the partitions are like that:
C=SevenOS, D=Data, E=VistaOS
My problem is that I CANNOT boot Seven as there is no dual boot menu showing at all during boot time.
I downloaded BCDEdit and added a menu entry for Seven, but that did not work. Again, no dual boot menu showing at all.
So here's my question: how can I set up a dual boot process using the standard tool of Vista, for BCDEdit didn't work and at this very moment I cannot boot Seven?
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Nov 16, 2009
I lost my Event Viewer, and had to do a repair installation to fix it. Unfortunately, during the repair install, Windows decided to rename my second HD as the D: drive... it was K: before that. Now I cannot access any of my docs, pictures, music, or videos through the normal means... they don't show up in libraries or explorer, and apps like Restorator and Sure Thing (CD labeler) cannot find them. I think that means the paths are broken..?
It won't allow me to rename the HD back into K: (it's not listed as available). I can access the data by clicking Computer > D, and I can see the data is there, but its unusable as of now. Any ideas?
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Dec 5, 2009
Windows 7, 32 bit, 12 partitions on 3 hdd's, Windows 7 on C:
When migrating to Windows 7 I first tried to update my Vista which I had used happily for 2 years. Installation went fine, but there were too many problems after.
So I bought a new 1 GB hdd and installed Windows 7 there from scratch. It is on a partition with drive letter C. I copied most of my old partitions to the new hdd, went fine.
When trying to delete one of the old hdd's with EASEUS Partition Master Home 4.1.1 manager software, there is one partition on it (which once before was called C, then successfully renamed to Z ) which I can't delete. I has on it the following folders:
$RECYCLE.BIN
Boot
System Volume Information (locked)
-->and files:
BOOTSECT.BAK
bootmgr
They are only 30,5 MB in size. So I resized the partition to 1 GB.
EASEUS characterizes it as Status = System, Pri/Log = Primary. Windows Disc manager characterizes it as System, Active, Primary Partition.
My question is: Can I change the drive letter from Z to B without risking the whole system to be unbootable? (and maybe never be bootable again?) When trying I just get the usual Windows warning.
I would be most grateful for an answer explaning what and why or why not.
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Feb 13, 2010
the vista and win7 both has retail version,n it is 30days trial...for which lots of cracks n activators are available.i just want to know,i am trying dual boot,having win7 on C n vista on D partition,n both are activated by crack...but problem is,as long win7 is only OS,its activated but as long i install vista on D n apply crack,vista gets cracked but win7 on C again reverts to 30day trial.as i felt,this might be cause of installing win7 on C n vista on D,i mean oldest OS must be 1st,i dun know i m saying right or wrong.
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Feb 17, 2011
I was wondering if it's possible to run windows 7 along with Vista (64bit). My current computer has 4 drives setup in a RAID configuration and i am wanting to add a new drive which I could run Windows 7 on.
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Jul 27, 2009
Okay so I set up a new partition on my hard drive to boot Windows 7 from, so that I could have both Vista and Windows 7 on my laptop. However, is there a way that Windows 7 can use all of the programs and files I already have in my Vista partition? I can manually go over and start them, but they aren't on my "Programs" list in Windows 7 or the start menu or anything.
is there any way to automatically integrate all my files/programs with both my operating systems? I don't think I should have to download two instances of google chrome or firefox. you know? Any insight would be appreciated. I am new to dual booting. This is is the first OS i have ever installed myself.
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Aug 17, 2009
I've been going at this all day searching, trial and error, and it's all very frustrating at this point.
I use a custom bootloader for my vista 64 to trick it to be activated (not sure your policy on discussing this). But now I wanted to try Windows 7 since it has been released in the RC status (because I had aquaintances try 7000 beta, and no one liked it). So I want to have it on my machine to tinker with and test it out.
I ended up taking my 300GB drive, and removing about 60GB from it, creating a logical partition, formatting it, then booted into the Windows 7 dvd I have. (win 7 - 7600)
Firstly, it takes about a couple minutes just to load the files. Then once it finally gets to the splash* screen and the cursor appears.....it takes about 5-10minutes for the "install" window to appear which seems VERY odd since my machine is VERY fast.
It takes quite a bit of time to accomplish installing from loading to finished (30minutes maybe), and by then it overwrites my bootloader for my VISTA installation (so its not activated anymore), and it shows WIN 7, and below that Vista 64. Read more at the forum...
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Mar 6, 2012
I got an issue were i have to install windows 7.Currently i have an Dell inspiron 1721 laptop with windows vista.Problem is there is a lot of data on my machine and i dont want to format and fresh install i would like to dual boot is there a way to do this?How would you guys suggest i do this without messing up my windows vista.What programs do i need what steps do i need to take.
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Nov 21, 2009
I recently did an install of Windows 7 (a clean install) and accidenlty selected to dual boot somehow (I chose to install 7 on the D drive instead of C, where Vista is installed)
I do not want Vista anymore. How can fix this?
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Dec 19, 2009
i want to uninstall windows Vista but keep Win 7. Ok so Windows Vista is installed on the C:// while Win 7 is installed on the H:// drive. My Edition of windows 7 is Ultimate, I could reinstall but I have installed lots of stuff on it. I have Easy BCD. Picture of Disk Management is attached
Edit: I dont have a cd drive (i installed using Virtual Clone Drive)
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May 7, 2009
I have just joined this forum today because I have a couple of questions about installing Windows 7. My Gateway desktop has a 250gb harddrive which has Windows Vista SP1 installed on a 70gb C;/(active/boot) partition and a 10gbD/recovery partition and the rest of the drive is Unallocated- and this is where I intend to install Windows 7. However I don't want it to use all of the unallocated space, so during setup will I be able to limit how much space Windows 7 can use?
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Jul 29, 2009
I started out with Vista 32 Ultimate installed on my machine. I created a second partition on that system drive , and left my data drive alone and installed Win 7 64 Ultimate RC on the new partition. The system boots to win7 with no boot menu to pick vista from, any ideas?
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Aug 28, 2009
I am having an issue with dual booting Windows 7 64 and Vista 32. Here's the story, I had Windows 7 64 bit installed and needed to install Vista 32 to use some programs/hardware. I created a 20GB partition on my HHD using Acronis Disk Director. Then I installed Vista 32 Business onto the 20GB partition. Upon completing the install of Vista I rebooted the machine back into Windows 7. The weird thing is whenever I boot into Vista then reboot and try to boot into Windows 7 it says starting windows and the little animation happens then instead of loading the Windows 7 OS it just shows a blank screen.
I saved a system restore point in Windows 7 and I can boot into windows 7 via safe mode to restore it. When I restore it it boots into windows 7 fine but the same thing happens if I try to boot into Vista then reboot and try Windows 7. I ran startup repair off the windows 7 disc today but that didn't help. I'm so confused!?
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