Can I assign a letter to the SYSTEM partition?

[SIW2]

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.

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.

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?

 

[Night Hawk]

Even when custom installing a Linux onto to a flash drive you can still end up seeing the 7 mbr trashed! :roflmao:

That's when the Startup repair comes in handy! With a dual boot of Linux with Windows one thing to point out here is the Grub installer will want to be pointed at the drive or device used not the root which is made the mount point "/" instead. The EasyBCD program however does feature the option to restore the Vista or 7 mbr as a plus option for the program itself.