XP stays as Drive E: in Dual Boot With Windows 7

[Peregrine]

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop which I recently upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista doing an inplace upgrade. Everything works fine. I wanted to dual boot with XP so I followed the tutorial from this site to do so. The dual boot works just fine but XP is always drive E:, whether I'm in Windows 7 (which is always drive C: ) or in XP. Isn't the currently loaded operating system supposed to be drive C: and the other drive will be assigned a different letter? Or is that only on systems with two physical hard drives? And, does it matter? Seems to me some programs are going to choke trying to install and run on drive E:

A few more details on my system and what I did: I started with a single 93 GB partition and shrunk the volume in Windows 7 so the drive was roughly split in half. I left the unallocated space as unallocated and booted with the XP disc. I selected the unallocated space and XP made a partition using all but 8 MB and left 8 MB unallocated (not sure why it wouldn't use it all). I installed XP on this new partition, updated drivers, etc. and then ran EasyBCD as shown in the tutorial. When I boot the machine now I get the option to select which OS I want and I can boot into either just fine.

Advice? Thoughts?

Thanks.

 

[ZeshanA]

The dual boot works just fine but XP is always drive E:, whether I'm in Windows 7 (which is always drive C: ) or in XP. Isn't the currently loaded operating system supposed to be drive C: and the other drive will be assigned a different letter? Or is that only on systems with two physical hard drives? And, does it matter?

Hi! Welcome to SevenForums!
1. NO Windows isn't always supposed to be on the C Drive
2. It doesn't matter

Seems to me some programs are going to choke trying to install and run on drive E:

They won't. The ONLY reason that they install on Drive C is because that's how it's set in the registry.....

WARNING! BEFORE EDITING THE REGISTRY, MAKE A BACK-UP BY GOING TO FILE THEN EXPORT IN REGEDIT


To change it open Registry Editor (Write regedit in the start bar and press enter)

1. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion and click on it.

2. Find ProgramFilesDir in the right bar.

3. Right-Click it and click Modify

4. Under Value Data write in the location you want your files to install for exampe D:/Programs

Remember you have to reboot for your changes to show.

Thanks!
ZeshanA
If someone helps your click the scales at the top right of their post and click I APPROVE!

 

[wallyinnc]

Please be very careful when changing the registry. Pls backup your data first and backup the registry, create a restore point or image your drive. If something goes wrong you can come back to where you were before.

 

[ZeshanA]

Please be very careful when changing the registry. Pls backup your data first and backup the registry, create a restore point or image your drive. If something goes wrong you can come back to where you were before.

Thanks Wally. Adding that to my post now.

ZeshanA

 

[wallyinnc]

Very clear now!

 

[Peregrine]

Thank you all.

I won't bother with any registry settings. If it's happy, I'm happy.

A question though for my own understanding: Why is it that in some instances the currently loaded operating system is always drive C: and the other OS/partition gets another drive letter? I tried to find some answers to my question prior to posting and came across numerous posts where the operating system that boots is always drive C: and the other drive/system takes some other letter. Does it have to do with the order in which the operating systems were installed? One hard drive versus two? I'm curious how you end up with these different scenarios.

Thanks again.

 

[gregrocker]

It has to do with how the last installed OS views the drive config. The fact that XP is not D means that letter must have been taken by optical or other drive.

It almost isn't worth worrying about since it will have ZERO effect on installed programs or files.

Most importantly, though, never try to change an OS drive letter using registry. It will ALWAYS make your system unbootable. The exception is if somehow the letter slips off after being assigned. Then MS has a tutorial which warns clearly NOT to use it otherwise.

 

[BadLag]

When I boot to XP, its drive C:, when I boot to Win7, its drive C: .. the other drives will have other letters, as long as you know that, it does not matter what drive letter windows is...its a Windows thing and will always be that way, its all about the Active partition and the Master Boot record (MBR)

MOOT POINT with Windows

Most software installs will default to C:\Programs Files...you can change that in the install.

 

[wallyinnc]

Thank you all.

I won't bother with any registry settings. If it's happy, I'm happy.

A question though for my own understanding: Why is it that in some instances the currently loaded operating system is always drive C: and the other OS/partition gets another drive letter? I tried to find some answers to my question prior to posting and came across numerous posts where the operating system that boots is always drive C: and the other drive/system takes some other letter. Does it have to do with the order in which the operating systems were installed? One hard drive versus two? I'm curious how you end up with these different scenarios.

Thanks again.

+
Do you also have the 100MB partition? I think that is getting C: when you boot

 

[Peregrine]

Thanks to all for your help. I think I understand what is going on now.

@ wallyinnc: no 100 MB partition since I did an inplace upgrade from Vista.

It turns out that it's the order that the OS's get installed that causes this behaviour. If Win7 is installed first followed by WinXP, XP doesn't really know what to do with the Win7 partition and just calls it the C: drive and then calls itself the E: drive (in my case). And it forever remains E: drive.

If WinXP is installed first it becomes the C: drive. Then when installing Win7 it recognizes the XP partition and does know how to deal with it. So once this installation is done either OS becomes C: when it is loaded at boot.

I guess the only downside to the former (Win7 first) is that any programs that have C: hard coded into their programming wouldn't do well with the OS on E:

Since this is a test box I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP first and then Win7 and everything works just fine. Each is now C: when it is loaded.

Thanks again for all the replies. Much appreciated.

 

[wallyinnc]

Tks Peregrine for the feedback. Makes sense. In reality, I think that if you had just done a repair on Win7 as the last aaction, you proably would have the same result.

 

[ZeshanA]

Thanks to all for your help. I think I understand what is going on now.

@ wallyinnc: no 100 MB partition since I did an inplace upgrade from Vista.

It turns out that it's the order that the OS's get installed that causes this behaviour. If Win7 is installed first followed by WinXP, XP doesn't really know what to do with the Win7 partition and just calls it the C: drive and then calls itself the E: drive (in my case). And it forever remains E: drive.

If WinXP is installed first it becomes the C: drive. Then when installing Win7 it recognizes the XP partition and does know how to deal with it. So once this installation is done either OS becomes C: when it is loaded at boot.

I guess the only downside to the former (Win7 first) is that any programs that have C: hard coded into their programming wouldn't do well with the OS on E:

Since this is a test box I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP first and then Win7 and everything works just fine. Each is now C: when it is loaded.

Thanks again for all the replies. Much appreciated.

Great to hear! I love it when problems are solved! <<<< (Weird innit)

Please click on the exclamation mark at the top right of the original post and request that this thread be marked as solved

Thanks,
ZeshanA

 

[goyta]

Actually, XP assigns drive letter C: to the active partition on the HDD at the moment of setup. (If you have two or more internal HDDs, each one with an active partition, XP will follow the SATA or PATA interface order on the motherboard, first following the sequence of their active partitions, then the non-active ones starting from the first HDD.) You don't have to necessarily install XP into the active partition, but if you don't, the system drive won't be C: - it will be some other letter depending on your configuration.

If you install XP to the active partition, its system partition will be C: when you are on XP, and some other letter when you are on Windows 7, when the reverse will happen.

My advice is to use a disk utility such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager or Acronis Disk Manager to mark the partition where you want to install XP as active. Then install it, then revert the Windows 7 partition to active and finally boot with Windows 7's DVD to repair the boot record (which XP will have messed up, since it doesn't recognize Windows 7). This way, the system drive will always be C: when you are in the respective system.

In theory, having a different letter from C: in the system drive makes no difference. In practice, however, too many programs are badly coded, and hard coded to "C:\Program Files" or "C:\Windows" instead of using the %ProgramFiles% or %windir% system variables, for example, as good programming practices recommend. And some of them won't even ask about the install folder and will only use their defaults. This causes a lot of hassle, in my case also because many of them are culturally biased and will ignore the "C:\Arquivos de Programas" programs folder or "C:\Usuários" ("C:\Users") of Brazilian Portuguese Windows. This is why I always prefer to use English versions of Windows (I have seen device drivers that go crazy with non-English versions of Windows, too).

But even better than that is virtualizing XP. I have found that I still need XP for too few things to be worth keeping a separate partition just for it. A XP virtual machine under free VMware Player is doing wonders here, with excellent performance in both guest and host systems even in my 4-year-old machine with a single-core processor and 2 GB RAM (with 768 MB allocated to XP's VM when it's running) - see specs below.

 

[gregrocker]

Brilliant. Thanks, Goyta.

 

[Dwarf]

Don't worry about it. Here is how my drives are lettered:

Drive D is actually my boot drive (the first OS installed), but the active OS is always C whichever OS I boot into.

 

[gregrocker]

Don't worry about it. Here is how my drives are lettered:
View attachment 39427
Drive D is actually my boot drive (the first OS installed), but the active OS is always C whichever OS I boot into.

Are you able to run both 64 bit and 32 bit on that machine with same license? Just askin.

 

[Dwarf]

Yes and no.

For Vista, no. My original copy of Vista was Home Premium 32-bit so, when I got the Ultimate edition I decided to use the key that came with that for the 64-bit disk (Ultimate) and the other key for the 32-bit disk (Home Premium) since they already had SP1 preintegrated (my original Vista didn't).

With Windows 7, then yes. I obtained these as a Microsoft Partner and they are both activated legitimately.

 

[gregrocker]

With Windows 7, then yes. I obtained these as a Microsoft Partner and they are both activated legitimately.

So both 32 and 64 bit are running on the same key? I had heard this is possible on the same machine.

Of course it breaks the EULA for only one copy of 7 to each key. But MS can't see it apparently on the same MAC/hardware config.