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

Peregrine said:

Thanks to all for your help. I think I understand what is going on now.

@ wallyinnc: no 100 MB partition since I did an inplace upgrade from Vista.

It turns out that it's the order that the OS's get installed that causes this behaviour. If Win7 is installed first followed by WinXP, XP doesn't really know what to do with the Win7 partition and just calls it the C: drive and then calls itself the E: drive (in my case). And it forever remains E: drive.

If WinXP is installed first it becomes the C: drive. Then when installing Win7 it recognizes the XP partition and does know how to deal with it. So once this installation is done either OS becomes C: when it is loaded at boot.

I guess the only downside to the former (Win7 first) is that any programs that have C: hard coded into their programming wouldn't do well with the OS on E:

Since this is a test box I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP first and then Win7 and everything works just fine. Each is now C: when it is loaded.

Thanks again for all the replies. Much appreciated.

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

Please click on the exclamation mark at the top right of the original post and request that this thread be marked as solved

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.

Dwarf said:

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.

Dwarf said:

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.