Repair XP on dual boot system with Vista Ultimate

Sorry to hear that Pete, I haven’t had to do a complete reinstall either in more that 5 years but have one coming up soon when I replace this machine and I’m not looking forward to it.

You asked if multiple partitions can affect performance. I don’t believe physical partitions can have any affect, but if you have them all visible to the operating system and mounted with drive letters then I don’t know. I normally have a lot of partitions but only ever have the booted OS and one data partition from each hard drive showing. The only performance issue I’ve heard of is if you were running your OS on a partition at the very end of a drive. The seek and read times from the inner most tracks on the hard drive platters is a little slower than from the outer tracks.

If you are going for the dualboot again with Vista then I would advise against letting Vista create any of your partitions. Vista’s New Partitioning Rules

 

Thanks McTavish.