installed Windows 7, got a drive letter problem....

i run vista 64-bit on my m1730 (raid 0), and shrank the partition to install windows 7 and try it out. it worked fine, but noticed that every time i switched between the OS's, it'd go directly into chkdsk on boot up. fixing errors, then starting the OS.

i think it had something to do with drive letter allocation within the OS.

i want to try W7 again, but this time i am planning on breaking the raid 0 array into 2 non-raid drives, and use one of them for storage (music/movies/etc.). so i would be using 1 physical disk for both OS's, possibly ubuntu as well....

 

I'm not sure if you're asking a question here, or making a comment?

But anyway, as you mentioned, I suspect your issue had something to do with your using RAID. I'm sure you'll have no issues with a single drive as your primary systems multiple boot drive.

As for Vista/W7/Ubuntu tri-booting, if you'd like an easy way to control the boot process, you can use Easy BCD

It's a great little freeware proggy which will allow you to avoid the hassle of LILO or Grub, and you can also set your Vista install as default on time-out, so if anything goes awry with your Linux install you will default boot into Vista.

Also don't forget Vista can't do more than 4 primary partitions, but you can use an extended partition containing other logical partitions if you need multiple partitions for your Linux install (home, page, etc).

GL

 

i would assume raid had something to do with it too....thanks for the info.
what i want to do is set up 3 partitions on my first HDD, basically something like Vista on the first, W7 on the second and a 3rd partition for ubuntu.

so if i removed raid from my bios, and reconfigured my first drive, i'd assume i'm setting up 2 primary partitions (vista/w7) and then an ext3 partition for ubuntu.

i don't mind using grub to load my OS's, i know how to configure grub to add vista and w7....

just that i didn't want to run into a 'greed' conflict between the 2 windows OS's for the C: title as it seemed the case was with my previous setup.

 

Agreed. But that should've been a non-issue. W7 installs it's own bootloader which give the choice of which OS to boot into upon boot, and then makes W7 the only "c:" within the W7 partition! In fact, when in W7 you can't even see a drive letter for the original Vista partition, much less even access it! Well, until you manually assign a drive letter to the original Vista partition other than "c:"

So yeah, this likely was RAID related, and w/o RAID the W7 install (in it's own partition) should definitely not have any issues over "c:". It's very good in that regard.

 

it's been about a month since i installed w7, but then uninstalled it when i was having this issue. now that u mentioned it, i think this might have been my problem, and i can't recall which OS was doing it, but it was looking to reassign the drive letter because there could only be 1 C:....

its one of the things i'm not crazy about with windows OS's....

i'm going to be attempting this one more time and see what happens....i have acronis TI 11, so after the partition, i'm going to restore Vista from the backup i created.

do you think it's best to install w7 on the first partition, or the second ?

 

Oh, there's no need to assign drive letters when doing the W7 install, or before any install, actually.

I would just restore Vista to a large enough partition to handle both OSs. That would be the original c:. You can then create a partition using Vista's disk management and leave it unassigned. Then install W7 into the unassigned partition where W7 will designate this new partition as it's own c:

Each OS will then see it's own partition as it's own c:, and the other OS's partition as whatever letter you care to assign them from within each respective OS.

So Vista will see itself on c:, and it will see W7 on, say, F: (if that's the drive letter you choose). Conversely, W7 will see itself on c:, and see Vista on F:.

It's all referenced from the OS your currently booted in. If that makes sense?

Vista and W7 will automatically assign c: to an unassigned partition where they install themselves. As long as the two OSs are on separate partitions they will install fine and co-exist nicely, each thinking they are c:.

And the W7 bootloader screen will not specify drive letters to boot into, but will simply display the two OS chpoices (Vista & W7).

I know I made this sound more complicated than it is.

If you decide to partition with Acronis, there's no need to assign W7 a drive letter. Leave the W7 partition unassigned. The W7 install will take care of itself and call it's home partition c:, automatically.

I hope I explained this well enough so it makes some sense.

 

understood, don't worry, you didn't complicate things...

i use acronis TI because it's the best tool i found to restore my system to an up-and-running state quick....

i could blow away my raid setup, resize partitions and be up and running with all my software the way it was in about 1 hr....

i think i am going to go for 2 partitions, leaving about 40 GB of unallocated space for my ubuntu install later on....

 

i tried installing windows 7 again, after removing the raid 0 config from my drives. i used one HDD for OS's, the other for storage of music/video/etc.

i used acronis to restore my vista installation onto the first disk (using the entire disk for vista partition)....then booting into vista, i used acronis disk director to shrink the vista partition, create another partition to install w7 on.

installation went smooth, however i experienced the same thing as before: after shutting down w7 and booting back into vista, dskchk starts up (during vista startup) and begins checking D: (this is the partition I installed w7 in), finds and corrects a whole bunch of errors, then goes on to vista login....

it does that every time i startup with vista, after being in w7.

i've got a feeling this will cause me problems down the line, perhaps messing up the HDD....or even the vista installation. so i scrapped w7 and put ubuntu in its place...