G'day said:
The only reason I'm putting in the extra HDD
is because of the negatives I've heard about 2 OSs on 1 drive. Am I
misled?
The problem is in our often-imprecise use of the word "drive". Just like
many other words ("right" and "left" come to mind), this word means
different things at different times, depending on the context.
If "drive" means a single partition or logical drive, then the negatives
you've heard are very true.
But if "drive" means a physical hard disk drive, then I'm in big trouble
because I have SIX versions of Windows installed on my 1 TB Disk 1, my
second HDD! I'm currently running the Win7 x64 RC from the 9th logical
drive on that disk!
Rather than type it all over again, let me paste what I just typed in
another newsgroup. It's partly a repeat of what I just said - or said in an
earlier post - but it seems to need the repetition:
<paste>
About "drive" letters: This is one of my pet peeves because it is one of
the hardest mindsets to break! "Drive" has many meanings, just like "right"
and "left" and so many other English words. And in computer-speak, it
sometimes refers to the physical hardware, but more often to just a
partition - just a defined portion of the physical disk. Our often cavalier
use of the word "drive" causes one of the biggest fallacies ingrained into
the minds of new computer users - and the fallacy persists even in many
(most?) computer veterans. :>(
"Drive" letters are never assigned to physical disks; those are assigned
NUMBERS, not letters. They start with zero, which is why Disk Management
calls the HDDs "Disk 0", "Disk 1", etc. Each "drive" letter actually is
assigned to a "volume", which can be either a primary partition or a logical
drive in an extended partition on an HDD - or to a partition on a flash
drive (not the flash drive itself) or to a partition on a CD/DVD drive (not
to the whole drive) or to a camera or a card reader. (I've never had a
network, but I understand that they also use "drive" letters.) But we began
to refer to Drive A: way back when we first started to use floppy disks in
the 1970's - and the term really did refer to the whole 67.5 KB diskette.
The name stuck when we added hard disk drives, reserving letters A: and B:
for the typical two floppy drives and assigning Drive C: to THE hard disk.
Then we learned how to divide the hard disk platter into "partitions" and
assign a different letter to each partition. But we continued to use the
term "drive" to refer to each of the partitions, rather than to the entire
disk. When we began to need more than 4 partitions on a single disk, we
created one "extended partition" on the disk; we did not assign a letter to
the extended partition, but we created one or more logical drives in the
extended partition and assigned a "drive" letter to each of those logical
drives. (We now often use the term "volume" to refer to either a primary
partition or a logical drive.) And then came optical drives, flash drives
and all those other "drives".
If you run Disk Management, you will see this clearly in the Graphical View.
Disk 0 might include 2 primary partitions and an extended partition with 3
logical drives. The "drive" letters might be F:, C:, X:, D:, R:... In
other words, the letters are independent of the sequence on the HDD. In
fact, there may not be a Drive C: at all - which blows the mindset I
mentioned, but is perfectly legal.
Vista changed the algorithm for assigning drive letters during Setup. In
WinXP, Setup first assigned Drive C: to the System Partition, which usually
was also the boot volume. (See the oft-cited KB 314470 for the
counterintuitive definitions of "system volume" and "boot volume" - legacy
terms that cause and perpetuate much confusion.) Then it assigned letters
to the other partitions, optical drives, etc. Vista Setup, though, when run
by booting from the Vista DVD, assigns Drive C: to its own boot volume,
which might be the 3rd partition on the second HDD! And then it assigns
other letters in sequence, starting over with the first primary partition on
Disk 0, so it is quite probable that in a computer that already has an OS
installed, the System Partition will become Drive D:. This will NOT confuse
the computer, or Vista or other Windows installations - or any well-written
utility or application. But it WILL confuse any user who is bound by the
WinXP mindset. They will think it is "weird". :^}
We should always assign each volume a unique name (label), which will be
written to the disk and will be the same, no matter which OS is running, and
no matter what "drive" letter is currently assigned.
</paste>
Thanks for confirming that you have only a single partition on each of your
HDDs. In that configuration, which is very typical, it's hard to see the
distinction between the whole drive and the partition that covers the whole
drive. One analogy might be a house that has only a single big room. When
you enter the house, you enter the room - and when you leave the room,
you're out of the house. But if that house has six rooms with six outside
doors, you can enter Room 1 without even knowing that Room 3 exists. And if
you've never seen a house with more than one room, you might have trouble
picturing one in your mind.
You really need to run Disk Management and study what it tells you about
your 3 HDDs. Hook 'em all up, then boot into Vista (or WinXP or whichever
Windows is available) and run Disk Management. The easiest way is to just
press Start, type "diskmgmt.msc" and press Enter. Maximize the window and
the Status column so that you can see which is the System and Boot
volume(s). The Help file here is loaded with good information, but it has
some flaws. First, this Help covers the entire Microsoft Management Console
(MMC) and you want to focus on just the Disk Management parts. Second, it
is organized as a reference, not as a text or tutorial, so you can't just
start at the beginning and read straight through. And, third, it covers
some advanced features that you and I don't need to know yet (like GPT disks
and dynamic volumes), so we have to kind of "read around" those parts. But
an hour spent in this Help file will tell you more than I can about how your
hard disks are organized and can be used.
The 3rd volume is a Seagate Baracuda
500GB this is the one I propose installing and putting XP on.
No. That HDD is not a "volume". Once you use Disk Management to create a
partition on it, that partition will be a "volume". That volume can be any
size up to 500 GB, the whole HDD. But WinXP doesn't need nearly that much
room.
If it were my system, I would first create a small partition (5 GB is way
more than big enough, but you have "more disk space than you'll ever need",
right?) that I could use for a System Partition, but leave it formatted and
empty; for now it's just a place holder. Then create a second partition; 30
GB is more than plenty; name it "WinXP Pro"; assign it any available letter
that you like, let's say "X" for XP; format it NTFS. Now, while still in
Vista, insert the WinXP CD-ROM and run its Setup.exe to install WinXP to
your new Drive X:.
Caveat: I've not installed WinXP over Win7. Which WinXP you have? Is SP3
included? Even SP3 does not know how to integrate with Vista or Win7. With
any version of WinXP, you probably will need to boot from the Vista DVD
later and let it repair the System Partition - because you are violating the
Golden Rule (newest system LAST) that I mentioned in my first post.
Now, reboot. It SHOULD start booting from your System Partition (still the
only partition on your first HDD, which has Vista installed) and present the
bootmgr menu with two choices (earlier and Vista). Choose Vista and verify
that Vista still starts properly. Then Restart. This time, choose the
"earlier" version of Windows. WinXP should load and proceed to the familiar
WinXP desktop. (Now you have the usual installation tasks, including all
the Windows Updates, drivers, etc., that have to be dealt with to have a
working WinXP SP3 system.)
Let us know, step by step, what you try and, verbatim, any error messages or
other problems you encounter.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 RC 7100
. I'm probably having a