Windows 7: Hard drives became switched

When you dual boot, If you select Win 7, it will be designated as the "C" drive for that boot cycle. Your Vista will take another drive designation.
When you boot Vista, Vista will take the "C" designation and Win 7 will be another.
If your two partitions have recognizable Labels then, using "Computer", you can figure which is which.
This is the way it went in earlier releases. Also in earlier releases the "old windows" didn't show and you had to assign a Drive number to it to see it in Win 7.
Sorry, I don't have a dual boot machine, They are all pure Win 7
D I C K Miller

Not necessarily.

My Vista partition is always C, and the 7 partition is always D - irrespective of which is the current boot o/s.

wow!!!
Thank you very much Dick. That certainly would explain the switches that I see going on in every time I switch operating systems, from vista to Windows 7.

I am presently in the process of installing a new win 7 installation on a new blank hard drive.

I didn't mention in my earlier posts in, realizing later that the problems seem to start six days ago

When my omega 1 GB external hard drive which I was using for backing up, suddenly started Chirping at a rate of around 60 to 70 times per minute, and was no longer readable. I was sure that the problem was a dislodged reader arm on the unit, omega agreed, and I put the new one in today, which works perfectly, but from here on out system restore goes on a four GB DVD, or it may be uploaded to .Symantec off-site storage.

Thanks to everyone, and thank you Dick for the switcheroo mechanism.

Goshannon

Thanks SIW2. I think I'm finally up and running , with a dual boot, But after five days I now find my wife and dogs to be absent .

ROFLMAO,

goshannon

Glad you got it sorted out

To prove a point I did the following on a laptop:
Shrunk the X64 partition.
Formatted the new partition and named it X86
Booted X64 and the drives were named C=X64, D=DVD, E=SD card and F= X86
Clean installed Win 7 X86 into the X86 partition
Installing created the dual boot MBR
Booting X86 the drives were listed as C=X86, D=X64, E= DVD and F= SD card
Booting X64 the drives were listed as C=X64, D=X86, E= DVD and F= SD card
Whichever OS is booted, it becomes "C:"
D i c k Miller

Dick, it looks to me that you have satisfied your hypothesis, which I will remember as "Dick's Rule".
WHEN IN DOUBT, TRY IT OUT.

mny THNKS AGN TO ALL,

goshannon