Peter said:
Andre, just noticed you said "separate logical partition"...not a primary
one?
I've set up a 35gb partition on my HD as a primary one in readiness for
Vista public beta...should I convert it to logical? Easy to do as I have
Partition Magic.
It doesn't matter a great deal. With Microsoft operating systems,
there need be only one Primay partition. You would be allowed to have a
maximum of 4 partitions, all of which could be primary, if desired.
Normally, people create at least one Extended partiton (leaving a
maximum of 3 primary partitions) because it's possible to create a large
number - up to the maximum number allowed by the alphabet - of logical
drives within an extended partitions. A primary partition cannot be
sub-divided in this manner. The need for only one primary partition is
caused by the fact that only a primary partition can be flagged as
"Active" (bootable). Logical drives with an Extended partition cannot
be made bootable.
When dual- or multi-booting, there realy only needs to be the one
bootable partition, into which the boot manager is installed. The boot
manager can then hand off the loading of the OS to whichever partition
(primary or extended) holds the target OS.
For instance, I'm currently dual-booting WinXPx64 and Vista64. I have
two partitions on my hard drive: one primary partition and one extended
partition devided into two logical "drives." WinXPx64 resides on the
Primary (C
partition, Vista64 resides on one of the logical drives
(D
within the Extended partition, and the remaining logical drive
contains shared data.
Naturally, I had WinXPx64 installed initially. When I installed Vista,
I simply chose the custom installation to place the operating system
files onto the logical drive within the extended partition. Vista's
installation routine automatically placed a few necessary files on the
primary partition to create the dual-boot configuration, and placed the
rest of Vista on D:.
The only thing different (besides the BCD, of course) I've found about
dual-booting WinXP and Vista from earlier dual-boot combinations (i.e.,
Win2K & WinXP) is that each OS sees itself as residing on C: when I'm
booted into it. With earlier versions, the drive lettering remained static.
--
Bruce Chambers
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