Can I assign a letter to the SYSTEM partition?

I would use option a)

If you have boot issues , seven on a primary means you can mark it active and run starup repair a couple of times - at least you should be able to get into 7 then.

Annaa said:

Night Hawk said:

There you had mentioned assigning a drive letter to the 200mb boot partition which can be done but not reversed later.

Thanks. That's one of the things I wanted to know. I won't do it then.

gregrocker said:

Annaa said:

Yeah... But in the event of a hard disk failure, doesn't that make you much more vulnerable? Since both systems + the data would be in one big extended partition?

Hello? If there is a HD failure then you'll lose everything on that HD anyway (...)
I thought you wanted to keep Recovery and HP Diagnostics tools bootable, in which case I gave the Best Practice.

I'm not very well versed in hard disk matters... Ok. Let me rephrase: I was going to follow the entirety of Method Two, but I asked for help on an Ubuntu forum, and those guys said it was a bit risky to put the Seven install, the Ubuntu install and the data all in the same extended partition. Or maybe I misunderstood!

Isn't it possible to have like, a partial hard disk failure that would affect one partition only? Meaning it would be safer not to put everything in an extended?

Basically, my question is:

(I'm not including Recovery and HP_TOOLS here so it's less cluttered, but yes I want to keep them, and bootable if possible... if possible.)

If there's an option a): [primary: SYSTEM][primary: Seven install][extended: Ubuntu + data]
and an option b): [primary: SYSTEM][extended: Seven install + Ubuntu install + data]

Am I more at risk of losing stuff/running into problems with option b), or is it gonna be the exact same?