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Installing WinXP as dual-boot with existing Win7, partition confusion
Acer Aspire 7551 laptop, came with Win7 Home Premium x64 already installed, and I've done very little (if anything, really) to tweak or change anything, until now. I'm trying to install WinXP for dual-booting (for playing a few older games that don't like Win7 at all).
Followed this thread's instructions (step 1 of the "Win7 installed first" method) which led me to this thread to prepare the single HDD with a new partition, 100GB in size, gave it drive letter X: and named it WinXP.
Trouble is, in following the steps in that thread to create the new partition, Win7 Disk Management never asks me whether I want the new volume to be a Primary Partition or an Extended Partition/Logical Drive, and it defaults to creating X: as a 100GB Logical Drive - which isn't detected by the WinXP setup CD. It never gives me the option to choose to make a Primary Partition. What am I missing here?
Partitions visible in Disk Management:
[no name][no drive letter] - 12.70GB - Healthy (Recovery Partition)
System Reserved [no drive letter] - 100MB - Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
ACER C: - 351.40GB - Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Unallocated space - 101.56GB
I did find this answers.microsoft.com thread whose answer is that I must convert the disk to "dynamic", however, the thread here (linked above, creating the new partition) warns in Step 10 specifically NOT to change to dynamic, as it could make Win7 unbootable. ??? Confused...