Windows 7: XP stays as Drive E: in Dual Boot With Windows 7

Tks Peregrine for the feedback. Makes sense. In reality, I think that if you had just done a repair on Windows 7 as the last aaction, you proably would have the same result.

Great to hear! I love it when problems are solved! <<<< (Weird innit)

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Thanks,
ZeshanA

Actually, XP assigns drive letter C: to the active partition on the HDD at the moment of setup. (If you have two or more internal HDDs, each one with an active partition, XP will follow the SATA or PATA interface order on the motherboard, first following the sequence of their active partitions, then the non-active ones starting from the first HDD.) You don't have to necessarily install XP into the active partition, but if you don't, the system drive won't be C: - it will be some other letter depending on your configuration.

If you install XP to the active partition, its system partition will be C: when you are on XP, and some other letter when you are on Windows 7, when the reverse will happen.

My advice is to use a disk utility such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager or Acronis Disk Manager to mark the partition where you want to install XP as active. Then install it, then revert the Windows 7 partition to active and finally boot with Windows 7's DVD to repair the boot record (which XP will have messed up, since it doesn't recognize Windows 7). This way, the system drive will always be C: when you are in the respective system.

In theory, having a different letter from C: in the system drive makes no difference. In practice, however, too many programs are badly coded, and hard coded to "C:\Program Files" or "C:\Windows" instead of using the %ProgramFiles% or %windir% system variables, for example, as good programming practices recommend. And some of them won't even ask about the install folder and will only use their defaults. This causes a lot of hassle, in my case also because many of them are culturally biased and will ignore the "C:\Arquivos de Programas" programs folder or "C:\Usuários" ("C:\Users") of Brazilian Portuguese Windows. This is why I always prefer to use English versions of Windows (I have seen device drivers that go crazy with non-English versions of Windows, too).

But even better than that is virtualizing XP. I have found that I still need XP for too few things to be worth keeping a separate partition just for it. A XP virtual machine under free VMware Player is doing wonders here, with excellent performance in both guest and host systems even in my 4-year-old machine with a single-core processor and 2 GB RAM (with 768 MB allocated to XP's VM when it's running) - see specs below.

Brilliant. Thanks, Goyta.

Don't worry about it. Here is how my drives are lettered:

Drive D is actually my boot drive (the first OS installed), but the active OS is always C whichever OS I boot into.

Are you able to run both 64 bit and 32 bit on that machine with same license? Just askin.

Yes and no.

For Vista, no. My original copy of Vista was Home Premium 32-bit so, when I got the Ultimate edition I decided to use the key that came with that for the 64-bit disk (Ultimate) and the other key for the 32-bit disk (Home Premium) since they already had SP1 preintegrated (my original Vista didn't).

With Windows 7, then yes. I obtained these as a Microsoft Partner and they are both activated legitimately.

So both 32 and 64 bit are running on the same key? I had heard this is possible on the same machine.

Of course it breaks the EULA for only one copy of 7 to each key. But MS can't see it apparently on the same MAC/hardware config.