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#11
The screenshot was taken on 21 Dec. 2012 just prior to the reinstallation of Win7CL on the left-most partition, and shows how Win7CL sees its own system partition with drive letter F when booted into Win7CL. After the reinstallation, which was recommended by you (gregrocker), and performed on 21 Dec. 2012, Win7CL now sees its own system partition with drive letter C. Infact, both installs (Win7CL on the left-most partition, and Win7OEM (drive Z)) associate the drive letter C to their own system partition; whatever OS I boot, its own system partition shows the drive letter C. So all is OK now.
I've always been in the tacit assumption that the Win OS Installer, in my case the Clean Installer, makes sure the newly installed Win OS, when then later booted into, sees its own system partition/volume with drive letter C, no matter the Win OS installer was running from an external USB drive, another Windows version on the HDD, or from DVD. I've always been under the impression that the association of drive letters to any partition/volume is contextual, meaning just local inside the registry of each Win OS on the system HDD. All the different Win OSs on the system HDD shouldn'd care how any another OS does the drive letter association. That was the picture I had in my mind until recent, and I think this must be the same what you explained in your post, if I interpret you post correctly.
So, in whatever boot cofiguration the Win OS (Clean) Installer runs, the newly installed Win OS (when booted into) should always see itself with drive letter C, but ... that was not the case on my computer; Why is that? I don't know.
With me it raises another question about drive letter association to system partitions/volumes: when does the drive letter association really take place during/after a Win OS installation? Is that:
1) done by the Win OS Installer which associates the drive letter C to the newly installed system partition in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices of the newly installed Win OS, or is that
2) done by the newly installed Win OS itself when it boots for the very first time?
In case 1) is the answer, then I wonder why the Win OS Installer doesn't give a clear WARNING when the Win OS Installer is about to associate a drive letter to the system partition/volume different from C? Folks who are not very familiar with installing a Win OS, will probably not notice that the Win OS Installer wants to associate a drive letter different from C to the system drive; they don't pay any attention to the drive-selection screen, just as I did. Hence that I think the Win OS Installer should give a clear warning when it wants to write a non-C value into the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices for the system partition/volume drive letter of the newly installed Win OS.
In case 2) is the answer on previous question, then ... ... what? ...
Regards, j