Vista - Re: Recovering the booting Windows Vista beta 2

Sorry, one more addendum:

My last post about the dancing drive letters seems to be true for XP.
However, with Vista, both x86 and x64 took the C: drive letter, even
though there were several other formatted partitions.

Windows XP (when installed by booting from the install media) assign the C
drive letter to the "System" partition, then sequentially assigns drive
letters (D, E, etc.) to the first partition on the other physical disks in
order as enumerated by the BIOS. Other partitions are then assigned letters
sequentially starting with all the remaining partitions on drive 0, then
drive 1 etc..

Vista (when installed by booting from the install media) assigns the C drive
letter to the "boot" (OS installation partition), D to the "System"
partition (if it is not also the "boot" partition), then sequentially to the
first partition on the other physical disks, then to the other partitions
the same way as XP.

When booted from the install media, Windows Setup (all Windows versions) has
no way of knowing what drive letter assignments may have been used in
previously installed OSs, so uses its built in partition enumeration - drive
letter assignment algorithm. This is true for all Windows versions, but the
actual algorithm is not necessarily the same from version to version.

--
Bruce Sanderson MVP Printing
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders

It is perfectly useless to know the right answer to the wrong question.



"DCR" <dcr@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message
news:tDodh.49787$Fw5.20134@news-wrt-01.rdc-nyc.rr.com...
> Sorry, one more addendum:
>
> My last post about the dancing drive letters seems to be true for XP.
> However, with Vista, both x86 and x64 took the C: drive letter, even
> though there were several other formatted partitions.
>
>