Skiingbc.info Webmaster said:
Is it possible to install Vista on Drive E instead of Drive C where Windows
XP is currently installed? I dont have nearly enough space on drive C to
install it..
Yes, it is. (And you certainly don't want two operating systems on the
same partition, anyways.) But be prepared for a minor surprise. In a
feature new to Microsoft operating systems, Vista will re-labeled the
partition containing it to be C:, regardless of the drive lettering as
seen from within WinXP.
I dual-boot between WinXP and Vista (64-bit versions of both, not that
it matters, in this case). I have one physical hard drive in the PC,
divided into one Primary partition and one Extended partition containing
two logical drives. WinXPx64 has been installed on the Primary Active
partition for over a year. WinXPx64 has always, as expected, listed
this partition as C:, with the letters D: and E: assigned to the two
logical drives in the Extended partition.
When I installed Vista64, I deliberately created a dual-boot by
directing Vista64 to be installed on the first logical drive in the
Extended partition (WinXPx64's D: drive). In planning the dual-boot, I
had created and named the volume labels of the various partitions to
ease identification during the installation of Vista64. The Primary
active (bootable) partition, a.k.a. "C:," was labeled "WinXPx64," the
first logical drive of the Extended partition, a.k.a. "D:," was labeled
"Vista64B2," and the remaining logical drive, a.k.a. "E:," was labeled
"Data." All went well with the installation, and I'm dual-booting using
Vista's native boot manager.
When I boot into WinXPx64, the drive letters and volume labels
remain as they were created, and as one would have expected, based on
all earlier multi-boot scenarios using Microsoft's native boot loader.
However, when I boot into Vista, both Windows Explorer and the Disk
Manager report the C: drive to be the volume (a logical drive in an
Extended partition, remember) labeled "Vista64B2" and the D: drive to be
the volume (the only Primary Active partition on the hard drive) labeled
"WinXPx64." The drive letter for the "Data" volume remained unchanged.
Only Vista's Boot Configuration files are on the Primary Active partition.
This (relabeling the partition containing the OS as "C:," rather
than "hard-coding" C: to the Primary Active partition) is new behavior
for a Microsoft OS. It's a harmless feature, but it is initially
confusing to those of us who have habitually multi-boot Microsoft
operating systems for many years.
--
Bruce Chambers
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