Windows 7 200MB Partition

Bare Foot Kid · 29 Nov 2008

Hello Nigel; thanks!...:)

Later

Ted

SIW2 · 29 Nov 2008

Thanks Nigel,

I didn't see why not, but as I hadn't done it myself, it's good to get confirmation that it works for 7.

If you use Vista/Win7 bootmanger, it will ignore the VBR at the start of the logical drive and find winload.exe anyway.

Think the max no. of volumes you can have under the DOS system is 24 , so you could in theory, have a lot of different o/s installed.

They would all be started by bootmgr., which will be on the System partition (the one marked Active).

There are advantages in a multiboot scenario to having a dedicated System (Active) partition, which does not also contain an o/s (i.e. not also a Boot partition).

Hope it helps

SIW2

Barman58 · 29 Nov 2008

Just a bit of documentary evidence that it does work

SIW2 · 29 Nov 2008

Hi Nigel,

What have you done with Grub - did you place it on the MBR of the drive, or directly into the Linux partition ?

SIW2

Barman58 · 29 Nov 2008

Hi SIW2,

Grub is on the Linux (ubuntu ) partition out of harms way then point the Vista / Windows 7 bootloader to it using Easybcd

full information is here if you want to take a look ...

Ubuntu - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

Credit to the EasyBCD team

only problem I had was had to edit Grub slightly to point to correct drives grub thought Drive 0 was Drive 1 edited the menu pointer on first boot, ("e" at menu ), then edited menu.lst in linux

SIW2 · 29 Nov 2008

Hi,

I am mildly tempted to try new ubuntu 8.10 - maybe after Xmas as I'm going to be busy for awhile.

Thanks for that - thought it would be best to do it that way.

Cheers

SIW2

Barman58 · 29 Nov 2008

I'm still on 8.04 as when I tried 8.10 (the day it was released) the nVidia driver support was flaky

haven't really looked at it much lately as I've been too busy here

johngalt · 30 Nov 2008

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello SIW2, thanks for the reply.

No sir, I didn't mean after the fact; I'm sorry I wasn't clearer with the question to start with.

I meant when you first start to set up the partitions from the time when you first install the HDD. Say you know you want to create four partitions total, but you don't want one of them to be an extended; you only want four primary partitions. My question is: is this possible with the default Vista / Windows 7 partition manager?

Thanks again for your time.

Later :) Ted

Ted, a third party app, such as fdisk / cfdisk in *nix or a GUI-based partition manager will let you create 4 primary partitions. It's how I got Gentoo, Windows XP, and 2 partitions (one for apps and one for data) on my old 120 GB drive.

I suppose, also, that a set of windows boot diskettes would let you as well if you were to use the DOS fdisk to *create* the partitions (but not format them)....

SIW2 said:

Hi,

I have heard elsewhere that Vista, and therefore probably Win7,
won't give you the choice.

Afaik, during the installation, you could create 4 partitions - but the last one you create will by default be an extended partition.

The advantage is that the Extended gives you the option to create more volumes inside it.

If you want 4 primaries - after you have installed, use a 3rd party app. to delete the Extended and recreate it as a Primary.

Afaik, you should be able to use a Logical drive as a Boot volume though not as a System (active )partition.

Hope that helps

SIW2

Nope- Windows does not give you the choice from inside of Windows - it thinks it is smarter than you are.

baarod · 01 Dec 2008

SIW2 said:

Hi,

This is a Windows o/s limitation. You can have 4 primaries, or 3 primaries and 1 extended partition ( green rectangle ).

Inside the extended partition you can create logical drives. This is a way of getting round what would otherwise be a 4 volume limit.

The only practical difference, really, is that you can't mark a logical drive as active.

Not sure how you managed to get your extended partition in the middle like that, Ted. LOL

You will find that if you try and shrink/ extend that green rectangle - you can't. You can only do that to the drives inside the extended partition. IMHO it's better to have the extended partition on the right in Disk management.

If that bothers you, you could delete it and repartition, or use a 3rd party app. to move/slide the primary on the right of it across to the left of it. Not sure how well 3rd party apps. handle repartitioning in Win 7, though. Has anybody been using any ?

Hope that helps

SIW2

Sorry, John - didn't see your post - must have been nearly simultaneous.

Paragon Partition Manager works for what I've used it for with 6801 64-bit.

Californian · 24 Feb 2009

x3haloed said:

That's unfortunate. I would guess that they will update it to work with the new partition scheme at some point :)

Well, I really want to use TrueCrypt to install a hidden OS (mostly for fun :) ) and encrypt my drive, but I am willing to reinstall Windows 7 because I had to reinstall it two days ago after foolishly changing the SID. So when I reinstall it, what do I change under the advanced settings? Last time I formatted everything and then deleted all the partitions and then installed it, but should I make one partition instead of none? Thanks!

Edit: Someone pointed me to another thread. Thanks anyway!