Dual Boot question

Brink said:

Hello Vaio,

While in Windows 10, did you also remove the D drive letter for the W7 drive in Disk Management?

Hello Brink,

No, I didn't touch anything, while in W 10, before taking specific instuctions from here...

Kind regards,

Vaio 7 said:

Hi NavyLCDR and thank you for the quick reply.
One question, if I may, if I remove W7 letter from W 10 Disk Management, when I will boot into W7, does the Local Disk C: drive, used for W7, while on W7, will be visible and also usable??

Should be. Glad you mentioned the image backup. You have a usable rescue disk/usb created by the backup software? If it goes wrong, just boot from the rescue disk/usb and restore the old image. I don't think it affects the MBR and System Reserved partition.

This is the way I understand it...the MBR and BCD refer to partitions by physical disk and partition IDs not by drive letters. It is not until the operating system loads that drive letters get assigned. Thus you can change or delete the non-running operating system's drive letter without affecting booting.

Vaio 7 said:

Do I need to take a new system image backup after that change, or it won't affect MBR & System Reserved config? (In case I want to restore from a system image backup made 3 days ago).
I'm using a third-party app to make my system backups. (always "cold" backups, for reasons that are not relevant to this thread). :)
Thanks again.

The drive letter gets assigned by the operating system after it boots, so the old image will revert back to the drive letters assigned when the image was made but I don't think the MBR or BCD are changed when the drive letters are changed.

NavyLCDR said:

Should be. Glad you mentioned the image backup. You have a usable rescue disk/usb created by the backup software? If it goes wrong, just boot from the rescue disk/usb and restore the old image. I don't think it affects the MBR and System Reserved partition.

This is why I mentionned "cold" backups, always taken from outside Windows, via Recovery cd.
"Hot" backups have some restrictions, by Microsoft, for FilesNotToBackup & FilesNotToSnapshot & KeysNotToRestore, keys in the registry, so it's a big NO for me.

Vaio 7 said:

This is why I mentionned "cold" backups always taken from outside Windows, via Recovery cd.
"Hot" backups have some restrictions, by Microsoft, for FilesNotToBackup & FilesNotToSnapshot keys in the registry, so it's a big NO for me.

Wouldn't the answer be a big YES for you? Can't the Recovery CD that you use to make the backups with also restore them?

NavyLCDR said:

Wouldn't the answer be a big YES for you? Can't the Recovery CD that you use to make the backups with also restore them?

Of course it can, Backup & Restore, however, my point for the moment, is why W 10 sees all partitions, which means they're mounted, is it by design or a limitation, and also if just removing the drive letter for W7, while on W 10 would be a correct approach... and do the job without side-effects.
I tried 2 times the installation, same results, so, for some reason, W 10 installation setup does this, for dual boot configs...

B/R,

Does it really matter if Windows 10 sees the Windows 7 partition or not? If it isn't assigned a drive letter it won't show up in explorer or anywhere else other than in Disk Management and you won't be able to read or write to it in normal operations.

NavyLCDR said:

Does it really matter if Windows 10 sees the Windows 7 partition or not? If it isn't assigned a drive letter it won't show up in explorer or anywhere else other than in Disk Management and you won't be able to read or write to it in normal operations.

As long as C: can be read normally while booting to Windows 7, I do not mind if it's not visible or If I cannot perform any other operations on that W7 disk/partition when I'm on W 10.

It's a Windows thing. Windows likes to reside on the C drive. I have a dual 7 and 8.1 set up. When I boot to 7 on the C drive 8.1 is on the D drive. When I boot to 8, it is on the C drive and 7 is on the D drive. Both reside on the physical drive 0

OK, I used Computer Management under W 10 and removed drive letter D: (W7 partition).
Now, when booting to whatever OS the drive letter of the other OS does not appear in My Computer. :)
No side-effects.....so far.
Will report back in a few days.
Thank you all for your time.