?Hi, Stewart.
Thanks for the additional details. They confirmed a few of my suspicions -
but raised other points. See my comments inline...
"Stewart" wrote in message
Sorry, I did not want to bother people with too much information but I can
see that was a mistake.
As one regular here often says, there is no such thing as TMI when asking
for help in a newsgroup. (I'm not sure that's ALWAYS true, but it's a good
rule of thumb.)
I have 2 separate drives in the computer, C and D.
Here is a source of confusion - and it's not your fault or mine. The term
"drive" is ambiguous because it means different things in different
contexts. As you can see in Disk Management, "drive" letters actually refer
to volumes or partitions, not to a full physical disk drive. "Drive C:" is
never a physical disk, but only a partition on a physical disk, even if it
is the only partition and includes all the space on that disk. And, as you
see, the letters are like shifting sands; they depend on which OS is running
at the time. It helps a LOT to give each partition a Name or Label, such as
"WinXP" or "Win7 x64"; this label will be written to the disk and will not
shift when you reboot into the other OS. To reduce the confusion a little,
I try to always specify "physical disk" or HDD (Hard Disk Drive), and
"volume" or "partition". Note that Disk Management refers to physical disks
as "Disk 0", using numbers, not letters.
Normally C is windows 7 and D is windows XP, but this depends on which one
I am running, if I select XP then it is labeled as the C drive and vice
versa.
Yes, this is what I meant earlier. Win7 and WinXP each maintain their own
set of drive letters, and neither can see the other's set. EXCEPT during
installation. All the drive letters can be managed by Disk Management
EXCEPT for the System and Boot volumes; these can be changed only by running
Setup.exe again - by re-installing Windows.
If you want both OSes to use the same lineup, then boot into WinXP, use Disk
Management to assign the letters YOU want to use for each partition,
including the one where you plan to install Win7. For example, if you plan
to install Win7 on the first partition of the second HDD, then decide which
drive letter you want Win7 to use and assign that letter. Drive S:, for
Seven? (Drive letters need not be in sequence.) Go ahead and assign
(semi-)permanent letters to each of your other "drives", too: USB flash
drives, CD/DVD drives, etc. After you've assigned these letters, while
still in WinXP, insert the Win7 DVD into the drive and run Setup.exe from
there. Setup will be able to see and respect the letters that WinXP has
assigned; just tell Setup to install Win7 on Drive S: - and it will. When
you reboot into Win7, it will see its own Boot Volume as Drive S:; Drive C:
will still be the System Partition - and will still have WinXP installed on
it. (WinXP will see it as the Boot Volume and will protect it; Win7 will
see it as "just another volume" will happily delete all or part of it if you
order that.)
But many users are uncomfortable having any drive other than Drive C: as the
Boot Volume. If we install Win7 by BOOTING from the DVD, Win7 Setup has no
idea which letters WinXP has already assigned, so it starts from scratch.
It assigns C: to whichever partition we choose (first partition on second
HDD?). Then it assigns the next letter (D
to the System Partition - which
is still the first partition on the first HDD, and which still holds your
WinXP installation.
Users may be confused seeing S:\Program Files, but Windows is perfectly
happy with that. ;^}
When running windows XP everything works, that is all the usb ports,
external hard drive and so on. When I run windows 7 the external hard
drive is shown as connected but said to have no contents (empty) so that
is no use as a back up unless I copy across from C to D and then transfer
from D to the external hard drive.
I use 4 internal HDDs, optical drives, USB flash drives, etc., but have
never used an external hard drive, so my advice might not be the best you
can get on this part. USB PORTS would be handled by Device Manager, rather
than Disk Management; after the ports are installed and operating properly,
Disk Management should be able to handle letter assignments, partition
creation and formatting, etc., for devices plugged into these ports, just as
on your internal HDDs.
Likewise the memory sticks I have, all work in XP but often not
recognized by windows 7 or again said to be empty.
Memory sticks? Do you mean DRAM DIMMs? That's a whole new category of
hardware. USB flash drives, SD memory cards, etc., are managed by Disk
Management, but not memory. What do you see when you run Disk Management?
The scanner works fully in XP but in windows 7 seems to have lost its OCR
facility.
What make and model scanner? Do you have the proper Win7 drivers installed?
Which OCR facility does WinXP use?
Windows 7 does not work with homegroup so I cannot link it to my laptop.
Strange. Homegroup works only with Win7; does your laptop have Win7
installed?
Windows 7 upgrades have come in but when WLM 2011 is installed the
computer almost grinds to a halt so I have had to go back to WLM 2009.
As it says in my Sig, I'm now using the latest WLM 2011 and Win7 SP1 RC.
But I've used just about every combination of Win7 and WLM since it was
still in beta in 2006 with no such problems. Not sure what you mean by
"Windows 7 upgrades". Do you mean Windows Updates?
As I said, none of these are serious, just annoyances. I have run windows
7 repair from the harddrive but not yet from the installation disk, that
is what I was wondering; if using that disk to do a repair, not an install
would help sort the problems.
I doubt that an OS Repair would solve the problems you've described. You
may need to first rethink how you want your WinXP/Win7 dual boot system
organized. Then you might want to re-install Win7. Either (a) boot from
the Win7 DVD, with BOTH HDDs connected, to let Setup assign C: to the Win7
Boot Volume, or (b) boot into WinXP, assign the letters you want, then run
Win7 Setup from there, telling it to install on the "Drive X:" of your
choice.
If you clearly tell us (a) where you are, and (c) where you want to end up,
we can probably help you figure out (b) how to get from (a) to (c). ;<)
You're welcome, Stewart. Let us know how things work out for you.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-9/30/10)
Windows Live Mail Version 2011 (Build 15.4.3504.1109) in Win7 Ultimate x64
SP1 RC
