XP x86 and 7 x64 dual boot issue

Night Hawk · 23 Jun 2009

The copy of your partitioning here will show a proposed repartitioning idea to covert the first two partitions into one larger primary for 7 as well utilizing the vacant unallocated drive space at the back end on Drive #2.

You would first expand the last H partition into that space where you then move the contents on E to H. From there you would simply need a new 7 install onto the larger single primary used to replace the present E + C partitions. Once you start loading 7 up with programs you'll want the extra space for the primary there.

Unfortunately the penmanship using a trackball is a little ruff for illustrating things however!

Kirki · 25 Jun 2009

Thanks for the suggestion Night Hawk, might end up doing that - and you did rather well scribbling with a trackball. hehe.

As for my problems last couple of nights I've been logging into XP in safe mode and checking events, removing things from the startup, ran CHKDSK again and defragged the XP drive, ran SeaTools to check the disk (it passed) - so tonight I'll give XP a proper go again to see if it's still alive. Fingers crossed...

The one thing that caught my attention when looking at the events however was this warning: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation" - had this event 8 times. Trying to find out more on Google, but has anyone seen kind of thing before?

Also, another question: my XP has been updated via MS updates to SP3, but my install disk is a few years old and only up to SP2. Would that cause any problems if I decided to run a Repair installation using that CD? Or would this simply revert my XP back to SP2?

Thanks again for helping me out. Much appreciated.

Night Hawk · 25 Jun 2009

The first thing if a repair install will even work would be rolling the system back from the SP3 update. To effectively perform a repair install with it on you would need an SP3 disk instead.

Each large service makes quite a few changes where a roll back would be the only option to avoid a complete full install if it works. With the paging file error being seen it could also point out the drive getting filled sooner then you realized just before the "out of memory" error comes up or you may some bad sectors on the first drive itself.

One option available and even used by some gamers running XP was to disable the creation of the paging file entirely to see if that helps out any. If you are running out of drive space used for virtual memory that could be part of the problem preventing a normal startup.