Larry W--
It's as Rock says and you have to do it this way:
If you run Vista setup from XP's desktop, then you'll retain the driver
letters you have. If you do a restart and run the Vista DVD's setup, you're
going to have them dictated by your bios and they will change. It's that
simple and I don't think any of us have a work around for that.
To me, it matters not a whit. You have to be a little bit nimble when
you're doing things like shortcutting to XP folders from the Vista desktop
on a dual boot/multiboot, remembering that drive letters have changed, and
that you have to put :\Documents and Settings\Larry W's profile in the file
path of the XP folder you want to hit.
Once in a while if you open a notepad on one drive you'll have to modify its
file path to be able to close it and save its changes
I keep an XP shortcut on my Vista desktop that goes D (it used to be C:\
where XP is so now it's D because MSFT has false information in setup and
won't let some machines setup Vista from an XP desktop--vintage about 3 or 4
builds counting builds that were released to TAP but not anywhere else
before RTM). So to shortcut from my Vista desktop to XP I simply make the
shortcut by typing into an IE address bar or you can put a combo address bar
and run box in the task bar by right clickiing it>toolbars>address>unlock
taskbar:
D: (was C) \Documents and Settings\Chad's Profile\Desktop
Then you drag the folder icon fromthe name bar of the window to your Vista
desktop and you have a shortcut.
I thought you could change the drive letterwhen I first started dual or
multibooting, and I think the way it works is that you could if you didn't
have a dual or multiboot but just had divided your hard drive up into drives
or partitions. I know that as Rock says, I have never been able to do it on
a dual boot by right clickiing the drive letter to change at Disk Managment.
I am a big fan of a dual boot because you always have another OS to fall
back on on the fly (but of course we should all back up). When you mention
dual boot on these groups, you're going to get reminded that unless you hide
the Vista boot from XP when you go to the XP boot or other legacy OS boot
and perhaps a Linux boot,(I don't know enough about using it) or you will
lose system restore points created on the Vista boot when you go onto the XP
boot but not when you shortcut and you will lose the Vista backup you made
as well. Bit Locker encryptionis one way to do this, and there are several
others.
Good luck,
CH
"LarryW" <lwdaddio@newsgroups.nospam> wrote in message
news:VA.00000027.0604661c@newsgroups.nospam...
>I have a system with a primary partition C: and an extended partition with
> drives D: and E:. I have XP installed on C:. I just did a clean Vista
> install to my E: drive. I've done multi-boot installs of NT and XP before
> and when I did, the installation to drive E: left it as drive E: which is
> what I want. After installing and booting Vista, the last partition (what
> was E
is now C:, my data/programs partition which was D: (and which I
> want
> to stay as D is now E: and the XP boot partition which was C: is now D:.
> I
> could live with Vista being on C: but I really want my data/programs on
> D:.
> When I tried to change the D: (primary partition) letter to something else
> (so I could then change E: to D, I get a message that I can't change
> that
> drive because it's a 'system' disk. How do I either do an install such
> that
> Vista stays booting from E: or change so that my D: drive stays as D:?
> Thanks!
>