Dual Boot Windows XP/Windows 7 Dynamic Drive
Archives Forums/Win32 Discussion/Dual Boot Windows XP/Windows 7 Dynamic Drive
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| My father recently bought a bundled computer with Windows 7. On purchasing, he asked the guy in the store if he would be able to install Windows XP on the machine too, the guy replied it wouldbe okay. The computer was delivered with the HD formatted and Windows 7 installed, but when he went to (or asked me to, rather) install XP on themachine, I was reluctant when I looked at the partitions for the HD since the 500G drive shows as a continuous 'Dynamic Drive', rather than as the individual partitions. I have never encountered such things before, but on a bit of research, I have read that: Windows XP (Home edition) cannot access Dynamic Drives You should never install the OS on a dynamic drive, only data. Using the DiskProbe prograqm from Windows XP can convert the Dynamic Drive to a basic drive, but NOT if the partitions have been extended. (I don't know if the partitions were extended or not by the OEM guys) We have a copy of EASUS partition manager installed, and this DOES give the option of converting the Dynamic drive to a 'Basic' drive, but I reckon this may come with a risk of messing up the filetable or something for the Windows 7 C: partition, maybe? --note: In case it matters, the drive is connected via serial, but is the only physical HD within the machine. There is not 'RAID array' r anything like that, just the single (500G) HD and an optical drive. The partitions are (from memory, something like:) C- 80GB D- 60GB E- 160 F- 120 G- 80G Ideally, I suggested installing XP onto the 60G 'D:' partition. Worst case scenario - it shouldn't be too much of a probolem to reformat and reinstall windows 7 AND XP if really necessary, but I thought I'd ask here if anyone had any tips or advice, or knew of anything important before I went ahead... Thanks a lot for any suggeastions :) |
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| I don't know anything about dynamic drives, but if you have to reinstall 7 and XP, take a look at EasyBCD and its excellent documentation. |
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| I came across that while I was looking around anyway, but thanks, James - Yeah it's a really good utility and seeems to make the whole process dead easy! |
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| Personally i wouldn't install it onto a partition, because down the line if something goes wrong with the windows 7 install or you need to repartition etc it'll be a pain to work with. Why not buy another hard drive, disconnect the current one, connect the new one and install xp on it, connect back up the main one, then use F12 or whatever the bios command is on your pc to select the xp drive whenever you want to boot to xp. Last edited 2010 |
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| Re-partitioning isn't something my father really does, so that shouldn';t be an issue. If anything 'goes wrong' with the Windows 7 installation, that would be a case of re-installing windows 7 anyway, which should not affect the XP installation. There's a big problem taht I realised too, that is, wouldn't both the windows drives/partitions be 'fighting' over which is considered the 'C' drive? Anyway, I've made the suggestion of using another HDD, but it's not my decision to make :) |
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| There's a big problem taht I realised too, that is, wouldn't both the windows drives/partitions be 'fighting' over which is considered the 'C' No -- the "C:" designation is completely arbitrary. Typically each OS will consider their own boot drive C:, regardless of which physicial partition it actually is. Each partition has a unique identifier, and there is a registry key somewhere that assigned driveletters to the identifiers. More than likely, Windows 7 will think that its partition is C:, and that windows XP is on D:. XP in turn will think that -it- is C: and that Windows 7 lives on D:. Won't cause problems. Now, something to remember: if worst comes to worst and you DO have to reinstall everything, make sure that you reinstall XP *first*. Windows 7 knows how to co-exist with XP, and can automatically set up the dual boot stuff. If you install Windows 7 first and THEN XP, then the XP installer will most likely break the windows 7 bootloader. |
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| Gotchya! Thanks very much. That Win7 is 'dual-boot ready' is very helpful. I'll give it a shot today :) |
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| Ugh, it gets worse. There's a catch 22 situation. Apparently, the disk is formatted as 'Dynamic' because there are 5 partitions on it. This prevents conversion from a Dynamic to a Basic disk Okay, Simp[le enough, I thought, I just use DiskPart or the recovery disk to delete the excess partition and reformat so there's only 4 partitions overall... but, DiskPart will not differentiate the partitions of a dynamic disk :( This is becoming a real nightmare, and there seems to be no way of resolving it: 1) Cannot Convert Dynamic to Basic with more than 4 partitions 2) Cannot remove partitions of a Dynamic drive. Even if I tried reformatting the entire drive, I can only do so partition by partition and it would still be classified as a Dynamic drive :/ Does ANYONE know any way of deleting partitions from Dynamic drives??? |
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| If you're to the point where you want/have to reformat, you can empty out two adjacent partitions, and delete them altogether. You can then create a single new partition in that location, which would give you 4 partitions total, at which point you may be able to attempt to convert again. |
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| That's the catch 22, xlsior, Diskpart can't distinguish the partitions so I'm unable to delete them. |
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| Solved it, finally... The disk management mmc plugin in windows 7 DID allow me to delete the partitions, despite the console "DiskPart" not. |
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