Partitioning XP and Vista question...

I have a dual-boot (XP and Vista). When I partitioned the drive, I made my Vista partition a LOGICAL, not a PRIMARY partition. Was that a good idea? Does it matter? Advantage/disadvantage??? I use Partition Magic to do it.

I remember when I had the same setup, that after 4-5 weeks of everything working great, all of a sudden, it no longer wanted to boot into XP.

Thanks for any advice.

 

PeteC has shown that you need NO primary partitions, even for dual booting. So it appears to make no difference.

 

There's a good article here that explains that pretty well. You always need one primary partition (named the SYSTEM partition by Windows) but beyond that, you can direct the boot of XP to any logical drive in an extended partition (named the boot partition by Windows) where you have chosen to install it. Sometimes it's desirable to install to an extended partition so that drive letters of existing drives don't get changed. The system partition and the boot partition can be same partition or on different partitions or even on different HD's.

Also when Vista is installed as a stand alone system, it will not use the boot.ini menu since it has its own boot manager system. It will use the boot.ini if present in order to accommodate a dual boot with XP.

 

Ok cool...So making a logical partition on the SAME hard drive is fine for Vista then? Vista resides on the LOGICAL partition.

 

Yes, true and cool.

 

Believe surferdude2 is correct; you do need the one primary partition. Unable to find the reference I thought I remembered. However, in any case your setup is fine.