Hi, Luc.
Yes, I got your email. But I will reply only to posts here in the
newsgroup. That's what newsgroups are for, so that we ALL can learn from
each other. In email, only two parties can participate and benefit; in a
newsgroup, we call can teach and learn. If I give you wrong or incomplete
advice here, there are plenty of others who can correct or complete it; if I
give you bad advice in email, you're just stuck with it.
In the email, you provided a few additional tidbits of information:
"I booted from the DVD. No upgrade, so the XP partition remained intact for
100%."
OK. that's something that we didn't know. When Win7 is installed by booting
from the DVD, it automatically assigns the letter C: to its own Boot Volume.
It also, in some circumstances which haven't yet happened to me, creates a
small new partition (with NO "drive" letter assigned) for its own System
Partition; it may have done so in your situation.
"XP 32 bit Professional
"W7 32 bit Ultimate."
OK. Probably doesn't matter, as I said, but it's one less thing to wonder
about.
HOW did you shrink the WinXP partition? Did you use Disk Management? Or
a third-party tool?
"Acronis Disk Director. Before W7 was installed, of course ;-))"
OK. But you still didn't say if you put your Win7 partition before or after
your WinXP partition.
Have you ever run Disk Management? Just click Start, type "diskmgmt.msc"
and press Enter - and furnish the Administrator password. It may take a
minute or two to populate the screen. Maximize the window so that you are
not working through a keyhole, and widen the Status column in the Volume
Listing at the top so that you can see all the information for every volume.
Note especially which volume(s) has the System and Boot labels. Read KB
article 314470 (Definitions for system volume and boot volume;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470/EN-US/) for the meaning of these
terms; they are backwards from most users' expectations.
In the Graphical View at the bottom of the Disk Management window, note the
physical layout of the partitions on your HDD, and note the drive letters
assigned to each. (When you reboot to WinXP and run Disk Management, your
drive letters probably will be different. That's why I always assign a name
to each partition; that will get written to the hard drive and will be the
same no matter which OS is running.)
After all this, Luc, I still can't answer your original question. We have
more information now, but it has been dragged out in bits and pieces and
there still seem to be pieces missing . Like, which are your System and
Boot volumes when Win7 is running? Is the System Volume the same when WinXP
is running? Maybe if I keep asking questions long enough we'll get all the
facts we need. But it might be best to start over with a new thread. Lay
out all these details in the first post and clearly ask your question again.
If someone doesn't provide a better answer first, I'll try again.
Good luck!
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64
