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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