Advice sought on Dual/Triple Boot Win XP from PATA and SATA drives

It's my understanding that XP will always use the first primary partition on the first drive for the boot files. It's always worked for me that way and it hasn't mattered what OS was installed or even if there was no OS installed on it. Looking at the pics Sparrow posted, you can see that the c: drive is a primary partition, not a logical partition. Seems perfectly normal to me.

As for Pete's drive letter problem, I wonder if you could fix it using something like Partition Magic? First of all, I have to admit that I've never used SATA drives myself and don't know for sure how they affect things when it comes to windows assigning drive letters. But, before SATA, Windows would always assign the first primary partition on the first drive as the c drive. The next one in line depends on whether there's any other primary partitions or not. Windows assigns the next letter to the next primary partition found, whether it's on another drive or not. This would be the D drive. If there's only one primary partition found the d drive would be the first logical partition on the first drive, e would be the next one on that drive and so on. Then it goes on to the logical partitions on the rest of the drives.

So, first question to Pete is, is the partition that XP is installed to on the SATA drive a primary partition? If so, how brave are you? No guarantees but I would think that if you would convert the partition on the SATA drive to a logical partition, the drives would be lettered as you want them to be. XP doesn't care what kind of partition it's installed on. It only needs a primary partition for it's boot files. Only problem is, it would probably seriously mess up your current XP installation on the SATA drive (registry entries would be a problem, I would think) and quite possibly require a reinstall of Windows or perhaps even starting from scratch with that particular Windows installation. But I would think it would straighten out the drive letters for the other OS's. Just something for you to chew on.

Found these at MS. They aren't for XP but with Win2k it appears things are pretty much the same as they always have been. The one for DOS seems to be pretty much the same but may be a bit clearer.

How Windows 2000 Assigns, Reserves, and Stores Drive Letters

Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows Assign Drive Letters

 

Ok, it was a long thread and I have to admit to just skimming through it. Shame on me. My guess is that you would have been ok to begin with if you had created a logical partition on the SATA for XP instead of a primary but I guess it doesn't matter now. Till the next time.

 

Wow, that’s a lot of mounted partitions and drive letters Pete. You need to be careful you don’t run out. Windows will only mount 26 drives "“ A to Z. Assuming you have two optical drives then you only have 5 left. Remember you need to have free drive letters for removable drives etc. If you add another hard drive in the future you may end up having to unmount a partition to free up a drive letter before you can even use a USB Flash Drive.

Win9x won’t even boot if you exceed 26 drives. XP will stop during bootup, tell you that drives over 26 will be ignored, then let you continue.

 

I wonder if it has been dealt with in Vista. Perhaps you will be able to tell us soon. I’d be curious to know but I would not want or need more drive letters.

 

McTavish et al, PeteC has pointed the way to accomplish what he set out to do without falling into the traps that got us. By making only one primary partition, he forced the loader onto the system partition, and in the process can have an unlimited number of disks!

From Microsoft

Logical drives are defined as drives created in an extended partition. Any other partition is a primary drive. Logical drives can be addressed by paths, and so don't require alphabetic addresses.

 

Once you understand how the ntloader works it helps greatly in organising and maintaining a simple dual/multiboot set up. However the ntloader has limitations and disadvantages and personally I would always recommend using a third party bootmanager and make every WinNT install have its own ntloader.

With the ntloader you can only have one install of Win9x on the entire computer.
You can’t have Linux or any other OS.
The partition with the ntloader can’t be hidden from the booted OS, so it’s always vulnerable to malware corruption.
You can’t move hard drives around without editing the boot.ini accordingly. Even then your options are limited and you must always keep the ntloader drive as the boot drive.
If you have a boot hard drive or ntloader partition failure then you can’t just change hard drive order to get Windows booting as none of the installed Windows on those drives have their own boot files.

Of course there are repairs and workarounds to a lot of the above, but none of it is simple and most is beyond the average user. Having the ntloader on its own partition may be slightly better than having it inside a working OS, but only marginally.

With a suitable third party boot manager there are few limits and things are a lot simpler. My main machine, this one, has 36 fully independent and bootable OSes. My second machine has a few more.
Disk Management Screenshot
Partition Manager Screenshot

 

You have a lot of mounted partitions Pete. I only have the booted OS and usually only two or three data partitions that show and have drive letters.

I like about a dozen clones each of my working OSes. I can mess with an OS and try software to my hearts content and don’t care if I trash things, as I just reboot into the next one. I keep unused master copies that I’ll do updates on about once a month and then renew all the working clones. It means I can have a brand new install every day if I want, so I never have to maintain, clean, or repair anything. I also don’t have to run a mass of security apps to protect the OS. Any problem fixed with a reboot. My own foolproof System Restore if you like.

Doesn’t take as much time to maintain as a lot of people spend on house keeping for their single OS. Also no more reinstalls that can take weeks to get all your settings and tweaks and software back. I’ve been running this kind of setup for about 5 years now and can’t imagine doing things any other way.

Edit:-
No real thoughts on your pagefile problem Pete. Personally I’ve never tried more than one. Is there a way to get the dump data to go to a specified pagefile?

 

Oh I get it, a Windows BSOD will by default look for a pagefile on the same partition as the OS to dump the memory to. I didn’t know that but I suppose it makes sense as once crashed other mounted drives in Windows will probably go unrecognised.

Can’t imagine why yours is disappearing. Personally I would try just changing a few settings first to see if it makes any difference. If your O drive is set to Custom Size, then try changing it to System Managed "“ or vice versa. Try making the C drive one bigger and see what happens. If you have XP set to do a complete memory dump then I believe you need more than 250mb anyway. Shouldn’t it be set to at least the same size as the installed RAM. I don't actually know much about data/memory dumps - just how to turn them off.

 

Well Pete, it appears you aren't alone on this. I've always kept a 3MB pagefile on the system drive (enough for a minidump). I've not really watched it at all though because until yesterday I never really had any reason to check. Yesterday I installed a new video driver and after running windows for a while got a blue screen. Something I've only seen two other times (a long time ago) in the 3yrs I've had this setup.

Long story short, I looked for the dmp file and found none. Kind of blew it off for a while until I came here and saw this thread again. It made me think and it turns out my pagefile on the system drive was gone too. In the window where you set it, it still showed that it should be there. I've recreated it now and I guess I'll have to keep an eye on it for a while. I know it was there for a long time just from browsing in windows explorer. I don't have many files in the root of the system drive and I remember seeing it there from time to time. I know it stuck around for quite a while so I wonder if this could possibly be due to an update or something. This isn't much help for you but I thought I'd mention it. Maybe it'll get others that run things this way to check. I'm going to leave mine for now but keep an eye on it. If I figure out anything I'll let you know.

Oh yeah, my blue screen is taken care of. Unloaded one of the extras that came with the driver and all is well again.