Windows 7: Partitioning for dual boot from scratch

Hello, thanks in advance, this forum have been helpful many times already.

I intend to rebuild my system shortly, mainly reformatting/partitioning my drives. Full system wipe, nothing less will do... Spring Cleaning.

My goal is to have a small Vista partition as a safety net, and optimize my configuration to use Windows 7 as my main OS. I have 2 640gb hdds, one with a 16mb cache, one with 32mb. Both sata and in no sort of raid.

After researching partitioning theory (people take it seriously!), I'd like to try and take advantage of the outer edge of my hard drives, giving my os and page file faster access times.

However, I am unsure of how much control I will have over partitioning my drives from scratch. I would like to assign the following partitions, beginning at the start of each drive (the outside edge):

hdd1(16mb): :/pagefile for windows 7 ~4gb; c:/Vista ~32gb; ...
hdd2(32mb): q:/Windows 7 32~64gb; ...

1. Will this give me any problems? particularly having the first hard drive contain the page file partition before the active system partition?
2. I've read elsewhere windows creates itself a 200gb partition on fresh install, is this forced?
3. Install Vista then Win 7, then which hard drive should I point my bios to for the boot loader?
3a. Assuming I install linux in the future, would I then need to point bios to the drive I put linux/grub on?



other details: running a nVidia 750i mobo with pretty good bios, perhaps providing more flexibility when it comes to boot? Intel core 2 and all that.

I hope I've been concise and clear, looking forward to the responses
~TacticSiege

Hi TacticSiege, and welcome to the Seven Forums

What you do not say is how are you going to partition the Drives, Are you going to do this as you install the first OS or from some form of 3rd party Live CD, I would personally suggest the latter as it will give you more control.

The 200MB partition is only created by windows 7 If installing to an empty un-partitioned (or singe partition drive), so should not be an issue if vista is already installed, It should also give you the option to not install this partition if 7 is installed first.

If you are creating a partition(s) for the Page files to get most benefit these should be on a separate drive from the OS itself

It is possible when installing Linux to install Grub to the actual linux partition and use the Windows 7 (or Vista) boot loader to control everything.

I'm sure this thread will not be finished quickly so have not provided links but will do so if you want fuller information.

Well so far so good. I ran into some problems having a small partition at the beginning of my boot drive, but to make a long story short things are partitioned the way I want them now.

However, and maybe I should make a new topic... but I cannot move my pagefile to a seperate hard drive.

Control Panel > Performance Options > Advanced Tools > Appearence Settings... I go to the virtual memory section.

I try to set a forced size page file on drive b:/, which is on my second hard drive, not the one my OS is on. then I remove the page file on the OS's partition. Everything seems to be set up well (I've scoured the internet and this is how most everyone says to do things) but when I restart my computer, Windows makes a temp page file, of the original size, and looking at my disk manager, the b:/ does not have a page file on it.

Am I doing something wrong? Will windows only build this temp page file for a little bit? I am aware that windows must rebuild the page file when I move it... however it doesnt seem to be targetting the right drive!

Any assistance would be greatly appriciated! Thanks!
~TacticSiege