When Setting Up Dual Boot, Anything To Watch Out For ?
Jun 26, 2009
The machine that I've installed Windows 7 on is an older machine that I would like to use for trying out various operating systems, and even installing a small DOS partition so I can play around with some old DOS stuff I used to enjoy.
The computer currently has four smaller hard disks installed: two 30 gigs, two 20 gigs. Win 7 is installed on one of the 30 gigs.
Initially, I want to keep things simple, and pretty much dedicate one drive to one OS. For sure, I plan to install Linux, probably the Ubuntu distribution. And possibly OS/2.
What I don't want to do is find unpleasant surprises after I try installing other OSes, such as not being able to get into Windows 7 anymore.
I have a copy of System Commander v9, but I am not all that enthusiastic about the way it chooses to set up OS installations.
There's bound to be folks here who have dual (or more) boot setups they're running with Win 7 as one of the OSes, and I'd appreciate hearing from you if you have any pointers to share.
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May 5, 2009
I got my new drive. I'm about to set it up. Run some HDTune to check it. then load of Win 7 on my new speedy HD.
I had a question. I'm going to be dual booting with Vista on my current seagate 500.. and I'll be loading 7 to my new WD Black 640GB. So I understand I get it all installed. Restart the PC. then from here what do I do to make sure it writes to the NEW drive, and doesn't reformat the old.. I'd hate for that to happen.
I don't need to unplug my old 500GB or anything drastic right. I can simply just enter the BIOS. Change the boot order for it to load from CD.. and then I get to choose what drive to install 2.. and that will be the one I choose. right?? the 640GB. or would I need to set the 640GB for Master. and then reboot with CD in..
Also my new drive didn't come with a master/slave pin. so should I unplug my old HD when getting ready to install so I don't copy over it. or no?
I've basically never installed 2 OS's on the same computer before so just asking some of these basic questions.
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May 23, 2011
Have Windows 7 installed on the C drive partition of a large (1 TB) HD. On the other D partition is Win XP. The problem is that the people who built the computer used a bogus copy of XP to set it up. I have a real one and want to replace the bogus one. I thought I could change the boot order in the BIOS and have the computer boot to the MSFT XP disc. But after I change the boot order to the DVD drive it still boots to the screen with the choice of Windows 7 or XP. If I choose XP, I am in WinXP and can't get the CD to overwrite the bogus XP. I do not want to chance anything happening to my Windows 7 installation as it's perfect and has a lot of work in building all the programs etc.
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Dec 2, 2009
[Solved] Setting up Dual Boot on a flash drive that isn't always plugged in. I have windows 7 Home Premium installed on my desktop but I was hoping for a way to set up an installation of Windows XP on a 16GB flash drive that I have.
Not even thinking I just figured I would give it a try and I booted to my Windows XP disc and installed all of the files to the flash drive. Well needless to say it messed up my MBR and then wouldn't boot to the flash drive or to my internal hard drives anymore.
I was able to fix it by using the Windows 7 disc to repair startup but I still am not able to boot to Windows XP on the flash drive.
Is there any way to do this? I know I need to make some changes to the bootloader but I'm not sure exactly what to do. Is there a way to make it so it will automatically boot Windows 7 unless I put the flash drive in first and prompt it to as the computer starts up?
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Nov 1, 2009
Ok, so I just added Windows 7 to my lineup. After an epic battle with permission problems between XP and 7, I finally managed to fix it and have moved on to a slightly more odd yet annoying problem- my dual monitors.
The way I used to have my monitors set up was my monitor on the right had my task bar and icons... but the monitor on my left was the main monitor. That way when a program opened it would open on my left monitor (which is right in front of me) while still allowing me complete access to everything under my taskbar and all my icons to my right.
Is there any way to do that in Windows 7? When I select "Make this my main display" it moves the task bar over to that monitor, which is annoying. Any suggestions?
Note: for those of you curious on how to do this in XP or Vista- pick the monitor you want to be your main monitor (the one programs open on) and pick the one you want to have your taskbar. Let's use my setup- main monitor on the left/Task bar and stuffs on the right).
- Go to display, right click on the right monitor and uncheck "attached". This will turn it off. Now all you have is the left monitor with taskbar and stuff all over it.
- Right click the right monitor again. Check "attached" AND "Primary". Click apply. Right monitor turns back on. Everything refreshes and task bar is on the right monitor.
- Right click left monitor and click "Primary". Task bar + icons are still on the right monitor, but now all programs open on the left one.
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Sep 12, 2011
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
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Feb 4, 2011
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
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Nov 12, 2009
As currently configured, XP is on drive C:, Win 7 was added to drive E:, and the system is currently run as a dual boot. Attempting to boot without the XP drive present will yield a "NTLDR is missing" error very early in the boot process.
I have already tried the following:
(1) I moved the hidden Windows Boot Manager files (bootmgr as well as the associated Boot folder) from the XP drive root to the Win 7 drive root.
(2) After physically removing the XP drive, I rebooted to the Win 7 installation DVD, and used the "Repair Your Computer" option to pull up the "Recovery Tools". Then, using the command prompt utility, ...
(3) I attempted to write a new boot sector to the Windows 7 disk using the command: Bootrec /fixboot, - that yields an error though. The Bootrec /fixmbr claimed success, but ultimately did not make Win 7 drive bootable.
I had to reconnect drive C: just to boot into Win 7 again to write this. I do have files backed up, but to format and reinstall files would take many hours beyond just the time to transfer 400 GB of data, since I have dozens of purchased applications that need to be freshly reinstalled and validated as well. Basically I want my E: drive now to be my boot drive while the C: drive is reformatted and used for general storage.
Any idea how to make my Win 7 drive bootable? Do I need a partition program that is more adept at creating a viable boot sector, or is that even the problem?
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Nov 26, 2011
I have a Z68 AP D3 gigabyte mother board with Smart Responce capable. I have a 1 t sata HD and a 64 SSD. Trying to set up Smart Response.
Gigabyte show a simple video to make it work. But not working for me. As soon as the bios are set to xHD, my windows no longer works. It say operation system is missing. But after change back to AHCI, windows works again.
Installing Intel Smart Response also cause Windows to crash. At boot up, the intial 4 lights that forms the window logo at boot up freeze, then the death blue screen shows up. Need to repair windows again.
Tried setting bios to xHD and install new windows, but windows cannot recogize any of the HD while on xHD. Drivers for RAID found on my motherboard CD does not work either.
Tried to change cables to Sata 3 port only, also not working. Sata port 2 also not working. why cant' my system read xHD configuration? Am I missing a module or hardware?
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Jan 2, 2010
I have Win XP 32 bit on my old drive. I buy Win 7 full retail and a new HD. I set bios to boot from cd etc. Win 7 starts up. It shows the 2 drives, so I select new drive...no problems. It starts install. I leave it to do its stuff.When I come back its up and all ok.I dint get any option to boot from XP. The drive was listed as "SYSTEM" but not old Windows or anything.
Also ASUS chipset drivers dont work and they were listed as 7 drivers.I tried Vista drivers but it normally shuts down and restarts. Nothing.
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Jun 9, 2012
I installed a 64gb Samsung SSD and a WD 500GB HDD and I am wanting to use the SSD for Windows OS and then use the HDD for programs like Steam and Microsoft office and store music and pictures on it. Is this setup up possible and if it is how do you do it.
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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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Oct 30, 2009
I have XP (x86) installed on one partition.
Last night I installed Windows 7 (x64) on a separate partition.
Anytime I had tried this in the past, using Vista, it always detected the Windows XP partition, and gave me a boot menu with "Earlier Version of Windows" option to boot to.
This is not so with Windows 7.
How can I get the boot menu to show both options, to boot to XP or to Windows 7?
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Aug 8, 2012
I have dual boot with Xp and windows 7.when i log into my Xp all the restore points being deleted from windows 7.when i check the disk management information in 7 it shows windows 7 create a logical drive with my Xp primary drive.even i am hide the drive from both windows means Xp drive from windows 7 and vice verse.So i like to unmount or remove the drive partition of windows 7 from Xp and Xp primary from windows 7.So that they dont affect each others system files with being deleted the partitions.
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Apr 6, 2012
I installed opensuse 12.1 on dual boot along with my other windows 7 installation. Installation of opensuse is successful and i can use it. But when I tried to use windows 7 on grub, it says bootmgr is missing. I've already encountered this problem a long time ago so i tried to use bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot in the recovery console in the windows 7 DVD. Rebuildbcd and fixboot did not work and it said something like it cannot find my windows installation. I also tried bootrec /scanos, it returned a windows installation on D:\Windows but my windows is in drive C. I think this has something to do with me messing up the active partition in disk management a month ago but i already fixed it by setting the active partition to the system reserved partition. Only fixmbr is successful, but now i can't boot on any OS because it says: Missing operating system.I also tried bcdboot C:\Windows but it failed with a message that goes like: Failure when attempting to copy boot information..
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Sep 24, 2009
I was having win 7 RTM and i tried to installl OSx86 in second hard disk
after few failure i successfully installed OSx86 in my secondary had disk now the problem is that i cant boot win 7
i changed boot order i tried windows 7 disk repair
but both failed
im getting some Boot mldr missing...
Actually even OSx86 is not booting i get OSx86 boot screen with two hard disk to select if i select windows disk it still says the same Boot mldr missing.
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Dec 3, 2010
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
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Aug 27, 2009
I setup an XP/Windows 7 dual boot on two drives. Currently C: Windows 7, D:XP
Love Windows 7 and now I'm ready to convert to single boot Windows 7.
I'm not real savy re. bcdedit so will need very detailed instructions
I did find the command line in Windows 7 by going through accessories but I'm scared to go further without help.
Eventually I want to clean up the D:xp and use it for storage etc.
I'm guessing this procedure may have already be written up but I can't seem to find it.
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Mar 11, 2009
How to Change the OS Name in Windows Boot Manager ?
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Feb 23, 2012
I recently added a hard drive to my computer (SSD), and installed Windows 7 x64 onto it. The result being a dual boot system, which by default boots to the SSD, and optionally (by Windows Boot Menu), can be booted to the original drive (standard mechanical drive).
Initial setup went fine, however I decided to customize the Windows Boot Menu, so that logical names could be associated with each operating system instance. To do this I used EasyBCD and I altered the names in the Windows Boot Menu from: Quote:
Windows 7
Windows 7
to... Quote:
Windows 7 - SSD
Windows 7 - Standard Drive
Shortly after the modification I noticed that I was no longer able to boot into the original OS. Instead I was being presented with a "Repair Windows" option. Figuring that my EasyBCD "tampering" may have had something to do with the issue I decided to change the names back to "Windows 7" in the Windows Boot Menu. However doing so had no positive impact on boot up of the original OS.
After booting again into the original OS I accepted the "Repair Windows" option, and then left the computer over night to do it's "thing". After completion of the "Repair" the situation has deteriorated -
* Windows doesn't load (the same as before)
* Windows doesn't present a "Repair Windows" option (it did before)
* The computer reboots a short period after the "Starting Windows" screen is presented
As a side note the drive is in good health, and all data on it can be read from within Windows 7 when I boot to the SSD OS.
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Aug 6, 2012
I have installed a year before UBUNTU on my pc with dual boot (i.e. use either window 7 or ubuntu).the NTFS partition that contains the UBUNTU was corrupted and i wanted to take the dual boot from my PC. I used the instructions from the web site: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...t-environment/but the disk management tool would not let me delete the NTFS partition.Could any one help me delete the NTFS partition and use just windows 7 as the only boot. step by step help would be great.
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Feb 17, 2009
I got windows 7 running fine for a while now and ever since my XP did not boot anymore.I was not worried to much about it since i did not need it at the time.But now i really REALY need it,See i got all my Cubase projects in there and my cubase plug-ins al setup in XP and i need to get to the projects?At first it did not do anything and using easyBCD did not help either.I cpoied ntldr and detect to the root of C: wich contains my XP and now it shows the bootscreen but hangs on a black screen.The thing is right before the bootscreen shows i see the text" invalid boot.ini" flashing by very quick.I am able to enter that winXP install in safe mode and i tried safe/vga mode as well wich works but thats all.
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Nov 9, 2012
I have a laptop I bought a year ago on which a created a dual boot Win 7 (32bit)/Win XP SP3 install, each on a separate partition. It was my first Win 7/XP dual boot install, and my first personal system that I allowed to have a Win 7 install on it at all, so although I have plenty of experience working on pretty much every previous version of Windows, I have very little experience with Win 7 and dual boot configs.
Today about 2 hours ago my audio spontaneously stopped worked for no good reason, so after shutting down each program to see if that cured it (which it didn't), I restarted the system. Out of the blue, for the first time I've ever experienced it, I received the msg "MBR Error 1" - Press any key to boot from floppy. I don't have a floppy of course on my laptop, and if I press any key I simply get the same msg. I turned the system off for a few minutes to make sure it was a good cold boot, but every time I still get the same msg. I tried switching the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI (IDE is required for XP to boot, AHCI required for Win 7), but I still get the same error msg before I'm even prompted with the OS boot selection, so it made no difference of course.
I looked up this issue and found various suggestions, but none of the ones I found took into consideration a dual boot config., they were all Win 7 specific solutions. I don't what to try and repair the MBR only to have it screw up my dual boot config and be unable to access XP, which is what I use almost exclusively, nor do i want to lose access to Win 7 if at all possible.
I had a backup HD of my complete system that I saved several months ago when I upgraded my HD, and I periodically refresh the most important files on it, so I'm currently running on the laptop in question using my old HD, and it's working just fine. Worst case I can just clone my old HD to my newer HD that's screwed up, but I'll still lose a lot of changes I've made to the OS since I upgraded the HD and have to reinstall and config a number of programs, so that's my last option. I'll also have to back up about 200GB of data from the newer HD which is much larger than my old HD, and then restore it back after the clone, something that will take a lot of time and unncessary effort if I can just fix the MBR.
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May 5, 2009
I'm having a problem every time I power on the system. I'm dual booting vista ultimate with win 7 build 7100; with vista I have no problem, but with 7 every time I start the system the first boot attempt gives me the error 0xc000000e after the boot manager display: "the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible".;after a reset the system boots 7 with no problems. Win 7 is installed in a brand new hd(seagate barracuda 1.5tb) and vista on a second hd.
I've search the web for people with a similar problem with no success. I've tryed already many solutions but the problem persists(latest bios for the motherboard, latest intel sata drivers, etc). I'm hoping that this could be a bug in win 7 instead of a hardware failure for the hd. Again, the strange thing is that this only happen after the power on. After that first error, no matter how many reboots, the system always boot without problems.
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Aug 8, 2009
i did a terrible mistake. i installed windows 7 first on one drive and then i install windows xp on separate drive. and when i restart there was no boot menu to choose the OS from list only windows xp started straight away. i did not knew about EasyBCD . and i put my windows 7 DVD and run recovery. now i can goto windows 7 but xp is missing again. is there any way i will not install xp from beginning and windows 7 can add boot menu in startup to choose xp or 7.
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Feb 23, 2012
I recently added a hard drive to my computer (SSD), and installed Windows 7 x64 onto it. The result being a dual boot system, which by default boots to the SSD, and optionally (by Windows Boot Menu), can be booted to the original drive (standard mechanical drive).
Initial setup went fine, however I decided to customize the Windows Boot Menu, so that logical names could be associated with each operating system instance. To do this I used EasyBCD and I altered the names in the Windows Boot Menu from: Quote: Windows 7 Windows 7 to... Quote: Windows 7 - SSD Windows 7 - Standard Drive Shortly after the modification I noticed that I was no longer able to boot into the original OS. Instead I was being presented with a "Repair Windows" option. Figuring that my EasyBCD "tampering" may have had something to do with the issue I decided to change the names back to "Windows 7" in the Windows Boot Menu. However doing so had no positive impact on boot up of the original OS.
After booting again into the original OS I accepted the "Repair Windows" option, and then left the computer over night to do it's "thing". After completion of the "Repair" the situation has deteriorated -
* Windows doesn't load (the same as before)
* Windows doesn't present a "Repair Windows" option (it did before)
* The computer reboots a short period after the "Starting Windows" screen is presented
As a side note the drive is in good health, and all data on it can be read from within Windows 7 when I boot to the SSD OS.
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Sep 28, 2009
I have xp 32bit and 7 64bit on a dualboot and 7 is the default, however I want to change that.
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Nov 15, 2009
I had Win XP and Vista set up as dual boot. I have back up images of both using Norton Ghost. I then upgraded the Vista partition with Windows 7 RC and all was fine for several months. Last week I had issues with the XP installation and the only resolution was to put the xp image back on the xp partition. This action has left me with a boot screen with XP and Vista on it and as expected only XP can be booted.
I put the Windows 7 installation disk back in and it recognised the boot screen error and fixed it; (too good to be true I thought!) When booting, I got the choice of XP or Windows 7, so the Vista option had been replaced ) however, there is an error that cannot be fixed and so the boot fails. The PC does the usual reporting to MS looking for a solution but can't find one.
So, will I have to replace the Windows 7 partition with the Vista image and then reinstall the Windows 7 or can I recover this another way? Also, what is the best way to image, individually, OSes, so that the boot screen doesn't get changed?
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Nov 24, 2009
When my computer wouldn't turn on in the morning I did the usual diagnostics; unplug things one at time test with spare components etc... Any way I qucikly figured out the PSU was dead so I ordered a new one and was back up and running. However when I reassembled the computer after unplugging everything (and removing the m/b) I plugged the HDDs back into different SATA ports from which they orginally came. When I came to boot the computer up I got the error message: 'BOOTMGR missing' or it may have been 'NTLDR missing' I can't remember.
I fixed this problem by using the 7 startup repair utility. I have no problem booting into Windows 7, but I have lost the option to boot into my XP install on anther disk. I looked in the boot tab under System Configuration and the only OS showing is this Windows 7 install. So my question is this: how can I get the choice of which OS to boot back?
(I should mention that the XP install is on a different disk from the 7 install).
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Dec 15, 2009
I've a Dual Boot with Xp/Win 7 on my office Desktop workstation. Window7 is the beta version of the Win 7. And like all other companies.... my company also want it's wallpaper and screen-saver on each machine ..... But i somehow manage to install Window 7 on my office Desktop.
Now i want to remove Window 7 partition and restore my Xp MBR and that too without using Windows Xp Bootable CD ( as CDs are not allowed in my company )...
How can i restore my Xp MBR while accessing my Xp Partition as i already have deleted my Windows 7 partition .
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Apr 26, 2009
ok so im having a weird problem thats probably very easy to fix.
background info: before my Windows 7 install i had 3 partitions
vista 64
xp 32
empty (soon to be linux)
when i downloaded the newest win 7 build i deleted my xp 32 partition and installed Windows 7 on that partition. because Windows 7 creates that "reserve partition" or what ever, it extended my EMPTY partition with my vista partion. which cause it to become a "logical drive" rather than a "boot" drive. aka i cannot figure out how to access my vista OS.. rather annoying since im just toying with Windows 7 atm.
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