Any way to aviod messing up disk letters by hiding/not mounting them ?

Hello

This is a PC for someone else and I'm trying to disable the old windows install on a separate drive by making it inactive, however keeping it so it can be activated in case SSD fails or something happens to the new install later, this is a business office PC it has quite important data on it and this is for failsafe, the whole PC is built for secondary options, it also has an integrated GFX incase the PCI-E GPU fails.

I have a weird situation with diskpart, which I ran from win7 disk but show same thing with new win7 on an SSD, and it doesn't show letters properly.

SSD = System Reserved + C: (new win7)

HDD = System Reserved + C: (old win7) + (Shrinked C: >) Logical E: + D:

And I want to keep D: as D: in the new Win7 so it's also D: when going into old Win7.
And the E: was made after all the maintenance, backup of the old C: which was also defragmented and shrinked, for me it created an extended/logical partition, 3 max primary I guess, I hoped it wouldn't do this, but I didn't had experience anyway and didn't expect this would turn into a mess in diskpart.

I hoped I could keep old C: as C: and the Sys Reserved as no letter, so I don't need to mess with the assigmenets later if it has to be

Right now I have not booted any OS with the other drive, none of the OS know about each other's drives right now, so registry should be clean, but eventually i need those 2 D: and E: partitions to be used by the new win7. Also the old win7 needs D: partition for all the stuff to work.


I would be okay if windows would automount the whole disk, and unmount the two partitions that were from the old OS so it wouldn't be seen in My Computer when people log in. It would be fine if it was just a simple letter assignment, but because of this wacky mess I have no idea if I would ever be able to set it back once I change it.


I tried hiding the partition but it says for MBR all other volumes are also hidden so it hides the whole disk which is completely useless feature, i actually didn't try in practise, just applied it and went into details and all volumes had Hidden flag enabled.

And this is the stuff in old windows.

The big one in the middle is taken with a phone is the win7 install disk. But if inside the OS it works, that doesn't really help.

Is the solution as simple as using another disk partitioning tool ?

... sorry guys I don't have a lot of time with this I will be forced in a few hours to make a decision ... I will be thinking for other options while I do something unrelated I have to finish.

Well I wanted to remove the System Reserved partition (and move the bootmgr and all that) from the HDD before I backup it, a slight issue arised, the "system" mark didn't move to the OS partition as it should, still, it's able to boot and it all works, I just don't find any concrete information what is the "SYSTEM" flag for a partition and there doesn't seem to be any way to edit/move it, there's no references in BCDEdit.

Because the guide told me to verify both System and Active flags moved to the OS partition before I delete the Sys Reserved partition.

I've decided to just make it into an image with clonezilla, but I dont' want to bother with the System Reserved partition.


I'll reboot again to see if it changes.

Why are you showing us two different Disk Mgmt pictures of drives you say you want on the same system? This is confusing and probably causes most who could help to pass this up. If we saw the setup you want to have we could easily tell you what to adjust and how.

Just remove the drive letters in Disk Mgmt of the partitions you don't want seen in Explorer. You cannot remove C but the old OS will not be seen as C when booted into the new one if you put the old hard drive in the same system as you should have before coming here.

You can also change any data drive letters that don't suit you.

Any other questions?

Well I set the drive letter and they stay like that after reboot with no special volume flags.

I didn't kind of knew that for sure. I guess it's fine now, I did create a clonezilla image of the old C but I left the old C without any drive letter so it's hidden from windows users.

D: stays as D: and a new E: works fine, pretty much done, hope it helps someone else lurking around.

And I successfuly removed the System Reserved partition so I freed up a slot and now I don't have logical partitions anymore.

Kind of too easy at the end hehe, but getting here.