Strange situation.I have a set up with 4 partitions:1 ... Windows XP2 ... Windows Vista Ultimate (32 bit)3 ... Windows Vista Ultimate (64 bit)4 ... Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit)These all multi boot fine.When in Windows 7 only partitions 2, 3 and 4 are visible in Windows Explorer. Partition 1 shows up in DiskManagement but it isn't assigned a drive letter and is therefore invisble in Windows 7.Is this meant to happen, if so why?

while in Windows 7, assign your XP partition a new drive letter (using disk management). It will show up now.It happened to me too.

I have a multi-boot setup with Vista X64 and Windows 7 X64.In Windows 7 my Vista partition is not visible.I'm guessing that if Windows 7 is not the primary OS then is hides the primary system partition.....

If you want to see the vista partition while in windows 7, do the same thing I suggested above: Go into disk management, assign the vista partition a new drive letter (right click on the vista partition, and select "change drive letter and paths", click "change" and assign it a drive letter), and it will now be shown in windows 7.Doing this doesn't actually change the vista partition from being "C". When you log in to vista, the vista partition is the C drive again. All this does is enable windows 7 to see the vista partition drive while logged in to windows 7.

Thanks for the comments but the question was two fold:Is this an intentional 'feature'?If it is then why?Not being funny but lots of people (for various reasons) have multiboot systems so that they can use an older OS alongside a new OS (if nothing else to combat incompatibilities between the new OS and essential hardware or software). If this is intentional behaviour in Windows 7 it makes sharing data between the original OS and Windows 7 difficult for the non-technical user.I am perfectly happy to go into Disk Management and assign a drive letter but why should this step be required - it has never been needed before?Further if Windows 7 insists on writing data to the primary active partition during set up how will it cope with a system where Linux is installed in 1st place?Finally - why is the partitioning software in the installer so minimalistic? Surely Windows 7 will run from an extended partition (other Windows does) and yet you cannot create an extended partition with the partitioning tool - surely with current large drive sizes it should by default use an existing extended partition or create one ??? Or does MS really expect people to use terrabyte sized drives limited to 4 partitions?

Carol, I don't want to usurp your thread, but further to your question, I have one of my own! Once you have added your old (XP) partition and assigned it a drive letter, how do you get rid of it again? I like the idea of not seeing the old system drive while running with the new unless you specifically ask for it. I assigned a letter to my XP partition, moved my Outlook PST files over to Windows 7, then tried to remove the drive letter. However, it appears that once assigned, it can never be unassigned! Not even in SAFE mode. Anbody have any idea how to remove drive letter after assigning one to old system partition ??Thanks.

Still no answers to this thread so bumping it as it has been over 10 days since there was a comment.

Greg Wright said: Carol, I don't want to usurp your thread, but further to your question, I have one of my own! Once you have added your old (XP) partition and assigned it a drive letter, how do you get rid of it again? I like the idea of not seeing the old system drive while running with the new unless you specifically ask for it. I assigned a letter to my XP partition, moved my Outlook PST files over to Windows 7, then tried to remove the drive letter. However, it appears that once assigned, it can never be unassigned! Not even in SAFE mode. Anbody have any idea how to remove drive letter after assigning one to old system partition ??Thanks. Greg, That's most peculiar. I have an XP partition on a separate hard drive that had a similar lack of drive letter assignment issue that everyone seems to be having in this thread when I reattached the drive to the mobo and booted into 7... I assigned it I: and got the usual schtick about programs not working properly if you change the drive letter to which I clicked OK. After reading your post, I had to check it out to see if I could replicate the issue - and oddly enough, I could remove the I: designation - and it went away. Of course, this isn't exactly the same situation - the partition is on a different physical drive as opposed to being on the same drive as the partition hosting Win 7. My multi-boot scenario is a bit different - I can change the boot order in the BIOS. Each OS was installed by itself with no other hard drives in place. This guaranteed that the OS was installed on only that ONE drive and nowhere else.That may also have an effect somehow...

Carol Haynes said: Strange situation.I have a set up with 4 partitions:1 ... Windows XP2 ... Windows Vista Ultimate (32 bit)3 ... Windows Vista Ultimate (64 bit)4 ... Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit)These all multi boot fine.When in Windows 7 only partitions 2, 3 and 4 are visible in Windows Explorer. Partition 1 shows up in DiskManagement but it isn't assigned a drive letter and is therefore invisble in Windows 7.Is this meant to happen, if so why?it's that way by by design...W7 by default hides access to all other system drives(or partitions) so as to not confuse the end userbut you can add a drive letter to that partition in disk management in W7 so you'll be able to see it..

I can understand why you have done it but don't you think this is going to cause more and not less confusion to end users!My first reaction was "Oh hell they have over written my XP installation!" which is precisely why I opted for the multiboot version in the first place.It is also a pity that the installer can't make extended partitions. With 1 - 2 TB drives readily available it seems incredibly backward to insist that partitions must be Primary partitions - especially when there is an Active Primary partition already installed!!

fgdn said:it's that way by by design...W7 by default hides access to all other system drives(or partitions) so as to not confuse the end userbut you can add a drive letter to that partition in disk management in W7 so you'll be able to see it..Not all drives are hidden. I'm using a multi boot system and only the first XP partition was hidden. The second installation was visible by default.A German computer magazine confirmed that after assigning a drive letter to the hidden partition it's not possible to remove it later.I'm also wondering why the first system partition is hidden. It makes no sense to me.

If you do a clean install on an empty, unformatted drive, it puts a hidden, 200Mb system partion first. Then it puts the Windows 7 partition. The \boot folder with the BCD database is on the hidden partition. I suppose this is an attempt to keep users from messing with it. You can assign a letter to it with disk manager.

A hidden boot partition just looks like a really good target for malicious software to aim at!Also given you can only have 4 primary partitions on a hard disk why does Win 7 have to use two of them?I really think they should rethink this particular aspect of the Win 7 install.Let users see the partitions on their disks (unless they specifically choose to hide them themselves).The questions that still remain to be answered arehow does Win 7 deal with a FAT32 based OS (some users are still using Win98 because they have apps that are no longer updated and need to use them)and even more critical how easily is Win 7 going to be able to share the boot process with Linux, BSD or even MacOSX on Intel Macs etc.?

Greg Wright said: Carol, I don't want to usurp your thread, but further to your question, I have one of my own! Once you have added your old (XP) partition and assigned it a drive letter, how do you get rid of it again? I like the idea of not seeing the old system drive while running with the new unless you specifically ask for it. I assigned a letter to my XP partition, moved my Outlook PST files over to Windows 7, then tried to remove the drive letter. However, it appears that once assigned, it can never be unassigned! Not even in SAFE mode. Anbody have any idea how to remove drive letter after assigning one to old system partition ??Thanks. I had managed to use Disk Management to remove the letter from the Dell Recovery partition I have on the same hd where Win7 x64 was installed, but after I read your question I assigned a letter to my Vista x86 partition (also same hd) and could not unassign it like you (it says that if it is a System partition or has a paging file, etc it cannot be unassigned). I could however remove it with regedit (disclaimer: misuse of regedit can render your OS useless, open a hole in the ozone layer, create a time-space vortex, etc): - Run regedit (Start, type "regedit" on "Search programs and files", right-click the found "regedit.exe", "Run as Administrator") - Navigate to \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices - Delete the \DosDevices\<partilionletter>: entry - Close regedit - Reboot Unwanted drive letter be-gone. BR, Joao

Carol Haynes said: I can understand why you have done it but don't you think this is going to cause more and not less confusion to end users! My first reaction was "Oh hell they have over written my XP installation!" which is precisely why I opted for the multiboot version in the first place. It is also a pity that the installer can't make extended partitions. With 1 - 2 TB drives readily available it seems incredibly backward to insist that partitions must be Primary partitions - especially when there is an Active Primary partition already installed!! I believe the installer can at least install on a logical partition. I didn't actually try to create the partition with the installer (I'm not trusting partitioning to beta software!), but I: - had the disk originally partitioned as: 1- "OEM Partition" (Dell diagnostics)2- Primary Partition (Dell Recovery)3- Primary Partition (Vista 32)4- Logical Partition (Linux ext3)5- Logical Partition (Linux swap) - I used the Vista Disk Management to shrink the Vista partition and free some space between Vista and Linux - I used Linux to create a new Logical Partition on the now empty space (had to change grub's menu.lst and fstab to bump the Linux ext3 and swap one partition number, and reinstall grub on the mbr). I don't like creating partitions with Windows tools becausethey always seem to leave some space out. - Booted the Windows 7 installer, and pointed the installation to this new partition. It did not complain that it was a logical partition. I now have: 1- "OEM Partition" (Dell diagnostics)2- Primary Partition (Dell Recovery)3- Primary Partition (Vista 32)4- Logical Partition (Windows 7 64)5- Logical Partition (Linux ext3)6- Logical Partition (Linux swap) If it cannot create extended/logical partitions, I agree with you that it should, but too many options would also cause more confusion to the user. BR,

A German computer magazine confirmed that after assigning a drive letter to the hidden partition it's not possible to remove it later. I'm also wondering why the first system partition is hidden. It makes no sense to me. Maybe it's not possible to remove the letter with the Disk Management, but it is trivial with regedit (see below). As for hiding some partitions, maybe it is not hiding - it is just not assigning a letter to it; I mean,suppose Windows did not select and hide that partition with a purpose, but just cared to assign letters to other partition and not this. In my installation, Windows 7 assigned a letter to the Dell Recovery partition, but not to my Vista partition (when I installed Vista it also gave a letter to the Dell Recovery partition), whereas Carol's installation gave letters to the Vista partitions. So we may be trying to find logic in something that has none:-/ Br,

Carol Haynes said: Let users see the partitions on their disks (unless they specifically choose to hide them themselves). The questions that still remaining to be answered are how does Win 7 deal with a FAT32 based OS (some users are still using Win98 because they have apps that are no longer updated and need to use them) and even more critical how easily is Win 7 going to be able to share the boot process with Linux, BSD or even MacOSX on Intel Macs etc.? I beg to differ on the "Let the users see the partitions" part: A user knowingly installing Windows 7 on a multi-OS/multi-partition/multi-boot computer is not your average Windows user, and will know how to assign/unassign letters to the partitions she wants - and will know how to use them safely. If a user doesn't really know what he's doingbut manages to repartition the hd and install Windows 7 on a separate partition, thus creating a multi-boot/multi-partition through the magic of GUI, then I'd say it is safer (less prone to creating havoc) that he can only see a OS's partition when booted on that OS. I'd then advocate for the opposite: No other partition should be visible by default. For the sharing the boot process, I can only answer for the Linux part: Win 7 doesn't need to share it, because grub takes care of it. In my installation, it came out a bit akward, and the boot process is: 1- Computer boots to the grub interface, and offers me Linux or Windows2-If I select Windows (for which I configured grub to chainload to the Vista partition (see my partition "map" on my other post)) I get to the Windows Boot Manager, which offers me Windows Vista or Windows 73- If I select Linux, it loads Linux directly I didn't manage (though only tried for a couple of minutes) to make grub load Windows 7 directly. If I pointed it to the Logical Windows 7 partition directly, it wouldn't work. Maybe I missed something, or it is just that Windows 7 installation placed the Boot Manager on the Vista partition only. Windows never shared the boot process with Linux; the community grabbed the boot process by force (overwriting the MBR), then shared the boot process with Windows ;-) BR,

bnborg said: If you do a clean install on an empty, unformatted drive, it puts a hidden, 200Mb system partion first. Then it puts the Windows 7 partition. The \boot folder with the BCD database is on the hidden partition. I suppose this is an attempt to keep users from messing with it. You can assign a letter to it with disk manager. You nailed it. I looked at my partitions with your information in mind, and there is maybe a logic after all: On a non-clean install, it seems like Windows 7 will put BCD on the first partition it can "understand" as auseable partition, then hide it from Windows 7! In my case, the first partition was an "OEM Partition" from Dell, with only 47MB, and the second was a (NTFS) Dell Recovery partition,so Windows 7 installation placed the \Boot hidden/system folder with BCD on the third partition (Vista 32), as well as the bootloader (that's why pointing my grub directly to the Win7 partition does not work - there is no boot sector on the Win7 partition), then hid the Vista partition by not assigning a letter on Win7 by default. On Carol's case, I bet Windows 7 placed the BCD/bootloader on her first partition (Win XP), then accordingly hid it from Windows 7. Carol, you'll have to enable viewing hidden/system files to check that. You can probably find a BOOTSECT.BAK file and the Boot directory with BCD on the root of your WinXP partition, with dates corresponding to your Win7 installation. BR,

jsveiga said:If a user doesn't really know what he's doingbut manages to repartition the hd and install Windows 7 on a separate partition, thus creating a multi-boot/multi-partition through the magic of GUI, then I'd say it is safer (less prone to creating havoc) that he can only see a OS's partition when booted on that OS. I'd then advocate for the opposite: No other partition should be visible by default.No other partition should be visible??? Do you really mean that?That would be ridiculous - how would you advocate sharing data between multiboot systems (which I would guess most multiboot users would want to do).Personally I think this has all got a little ludicrous. Sheltering the average user is fine but that is achieved by OEMs. Sheltering EVERYONE because of a handful of people who might get confused is just plain stupid.Why on earth does the boot process need it's own partition, or hide a perfectly usable partition just because it decides to place a boot file there? Windows has managed to boot (as has every operating system ever produced prior to Windows 7) from its own partition without the world descending into chaos and confusion - all it did was set the file/folder attributes to hidden/system and the majority of users never see the thing.Maybe I am getting things all out of proportion but I would suggest that any installation should be transparent and not confusing. Installing an OS in multiboot mode is not the standard approach of most users - in fact most users will only ever see Win7 unless they buy a computer with it preinstalled - so making life more complicated for other users seems just plain daft - especially as the first thing most multiboot users will do is to add a drive letter to the hidden partition.What I cannot fathom is why MS want to treat customers as complete idiots. Vista introduced BCDEdit which I suppose they would argue added flexibility to editing the boot process for experienced users but as far as I can see only added a heap of complexity which obscured the boot process for most users and spawned an industry of utilities for editing the boot process which many users went out and downloaded - so it acheived nothing in the long run. People who don't know anything about the boot process aren't going to start manipulating it and those who do want to will do it no matter how obscure MS make it.It also still poses the unanswered question: doesn't a hidden partition in standard installations just beg for malware writers to hide stuff away there?

I had to mirror file locations so I had to use disk manager quite a bit. Moving to K: then assigning D: to I: then move K: to D: etc.....Would be nice to get a screen after install that allows you to cleanly select the drives and letters.I am up to K: my TB drive.C: 60Gb primary (XP 32)D: 100Gb primaryE: 175Gb primaryF: 8Gb logical (not sure where this came from but will be removed as K is not yet referred to)G: 100Gb LogicalH: 75Gb Logical (W7 64)I: 500Gb primaryJ: DVD ROMK: 1000Gb primaryThe ones in BOLD are switched when W7 is loaded. C:>H: & H:>C:Kinda interesting: connected the TB Drive (internal) to my running PC w/o problems. Had to create a 'simple' drive from the options/quick formatted NTFS/assigned a drive letter & made it active.

Carol Haynes said: > No other partition should be visible??? Do you really mean that? No, I did wrote"No other partition should be visible *by default*", but Itake the opportunity to be more specific: "No other OS partitionshould be visible *by default*". >That would be ridiculous - how would you advocate sharing data between multiboot systems (which I would guess most multiboot users would want to do). Again, multiboot users know better, andshould know how to make the partitions visible. Multiboot users who don't knowhow to make them accessible, would be safer not having acces to them. Directly answering your question, I recommend sharing data between multiboot systems on separate (non-OS) partitions or HD or NAS. That's what I personnaly do. Having your data on a non-OS partition is safer and more practical (well, at least if like me, you don't use the "default places" Windows wants to store stuff - which you can't anyway if you are sharing between different OS partitions). If I need to reinstall/remove any of the OSs I don't need to worry about what was stored where, and data is always available at one unified place, no matter what I booted to. >Personally I think this has all got a little ludicrous. Sheltering the average user is fine but that is achieved by OEMs. Sheltering EVERYONE because of a handful of people who might get confused is just plain stupid. You overestimate the average Windows user. More than a handful of people can get confused seeing two "Program Files" (in which one should I install this program?...), two "My Documents" (in which oneare my pictures?), etc. >Why on earth does the boot process need it's own partition, or hide a perfectly usable partition just because it decides to place a boot file there? I don't know, safetycan be a good reason(ifthe OS+data partition where you had the bootloadergets corrupted, you can still boot to other partitions). Having it hidden makes it less likely to be written, and thus corrupted, specially considering we're beta testing. Even on Linux/Unix, the boot process is started from the MBR then goes to a partition where "/" is, and on serious installations it is recommended that "/" is on a separated partition, and on paranoid systems youshould mount this partition read-only (and during the actual boot process,it can and often is mounted read-only). The same way, these make it harder for the partition necessary for the boot process to get corrupted, thus enabling boot and minimal environment for recovery even after a catastrophic corruption of the other partitions. You may not agree with the pros and cons of that, but ther -is- at least this good reason, apart from just hiding it from unexperienced users. (and I don't actually know for a fact if MS did it for this reason; it's an educated guess by comparison) >Maybe I am getting things all out of proportion Hmm, you usedterms like "world descending into chaos and confusion", "ridiculous", "ludicrous", "plain stupid", "plain daft". Maybeout of proportion and leaning to aggressive? I understand that hiding/not hiding the partition is a minor issue, but I suppose you (and so do I) are aguing about the reasons behind this and other "hide the complexity" cases, which are indeed of larger proportions, like this one: >What I cannot fathom is why MS want to treat customers as complete idiots. (being ironic to MS, not to you): Welcome to Microsoft world, where you just need to connect/insert an external media and it will automatically do whatever the autorun.inf tells the OS to. Where your email client automatically opens whatever it received for you, noclick required,in "preview" mode. Where theOS hides the file extention (the safest way in the world to identify thereal type of a file) by default. Where (until a few years ago) a web server cameenabled by default, etc. Nothing new here. I wouldn't say complete idiots but "IT idiots". Unfortunately on average we are all quite idiots (we may be non-idiots on somethings, but we are idiots on many things, and most people are IT idiots).Targeting this major part of the publicgave MS the huge market share they have today. So yes, MS treat customers as idiots (from an IT pro standpoint), because customers are, in great part,IT idiots (no offense here; I'm an art idiot, wine idiot, geography idiot, history idiot, biology idiot, etc). It's their strategy, and it is still working (albeit the vulnerabilities that this enables on Windows). Why target IT experts when IT idiots are the fat part of the market? You want a completely configurableOS targeted to IT-aware people instead of ease of use and market share?Debian Linux is what I use and recommend. My users need to use Windows, and the less they can tinker, the better for me.I envy Windows when I have to recompile a video/audio codecnot "free" enough for Debianjust to convert stuff to see inmy PS3. I envy Windowsbecause Knoppix live CD won't boot in my Desktop, while Win7 installation booted.I respect Microsoft for what they achieved in terms of user-friendliness (although I hate the vulnerabilities side-effects).And guess what, the more idiot you consider the user, the more user-friendly you become. When designing software I always think "what is the most stupid thing a user can try to do here; which stupid questions can I avoid by making this invisible until it's necessary, etc...". (I don't envy Windowswhen I read aboutConficker) >People who don't know anything about the boot process aren't going to start manipulating it and those who do want to will do it no matter how obscure MS make it. That's the point:MS can do whatever they want to hide everything "complex" from the average user. This is a good thing: for the user because there are less things to break, and for MS because it makes the "user experience" less complicated. For us tinkerers and curious minds, there will always be a way. Don't feel angry nor jealous towards the IT idiots; MS has to take care of them; we can take care of ourselves - and without them, probably there would be no Windows; we'd all be very happy with our command line interfaces and our VM370 on IBM 3270 ET-head terminals, or all running Linux/AIX/SCO/OS2/(whatever had a chance on the desktop before MS popped Windows out of OS2)on our desktops. >It also still poses the unanswered question: doesn't a hidden partition in standard installations just beg for malware writers to hide stuff away there? Probably, and so does the MBR, and yes, malware eventually hides stuff there too. So anti-virus should look for them there too (I know most AVs look at the MBR, not sure about hidden partitions - Irarely usedAVs). It's not like your "Average Windows User(tm)" will look for/recognize/removemalware using Windows Explorer. If she can do that, she sureknowshow tounhide hidden partitions.If there's a virus, it will hide in "plain view" even on visible partitions (besides using rootkits, it can simply hide on the default-hidden "system files and folders", or inside a system file). Note that to copy itself to a hidden partition or MBR, the malware would need admin privileges, so at this point you are already "own3d", and the safest thing to dowould beformat/reinstall anyway - having the partition hidden or visible would't be the culprit. On the other hand, avisible extra OSpartition makes it easier for a malware to "jump" from one of your multiboot OSs to the other (not that I believe hiding would stop awell writtenmalware, but the bottom-feeders "autorun.inf" types will often look for "drive letters" and replicate to there). Sorry that a veered far away offtopic. BR,

Carol Haynes said: A hidden boot partition just looks like a really good target for malicious software to aim at! Also given you can only have 4 primary partitions on a hard disk why does Win 7 have to use two of them? I really think they should rethink this particular aspect of the Win 7 install. Let users see the partitions on their disks (unless they specifically choose to hide them themselves). The questions that still remain to be answered are how does Win 7 deal with a FAT32 based OS (some users are still using Win98 because they have apps that are no longer updated and need to use them) and even more critical how easily is Win 7 going to be able to share the boot process with Linux, BSD or even MacOSX on Intel Macs etc.? Windows 7 should deal with FAT32 based OS's the way that Vista does. Windows 7 and the BCD are not going to easily share the boot process with Linux, or Mac OS X. It was only done through 3rd party software with Vista and the BCD has not changed in Windows 7 at this time. If you install Windows 7 after a Linux Distro you can use the 3rd party software that is available to create entries for it with the BCD or you can re-install GRUB. As with the Mac OS X they use Boot Camp to dual boot OS X with Windows and that is all dependent on Apple if they will include support for Windows 7. Carol Haynes said: Thanks for the comments but the question was two fold:Is this an intentional 'feature'?If it is then why?Not being funny but lots of people (for various reasons) have multiboot systems so that they can use an older OS alongside a new OS (if nothing else to combat incompatibilities between the new OS and essential hardware or software). If this is intentional behaviour in Windows 7 it makes sharing data between the original OS and Windows 7 difficult for the non-technical user.I am perfectly happy to go into Disk Management and assign a drive letter but why should this step be required - it has never been needed before?Further if Windows 7 insists on writing data to the primary active partition during set up how will it cope with a system where Linux is installed in 1st place?Finally - why is the partitioning software in the installer so minimalistic? Surely Windows 7 will run from an extended partition (other Windows does) and yet you cannot create an extended partition with the partitioning tool - surely with current large drive sizes it should by default use an existing extended partition or create one ??? Or does MS really expect people to use terrabyte sized drives limited to 4 partitions? At this time yes this was a feature and was intended. They did this as a security measure since this is a Beta and not a completed OS. There was several incidents during the ista Beta where Vista corrupted the partition tables and in turn multi boot systems. So they did this to prevent something like that from happening again. If Linux is installed it wont make much difference. Since you need 3rd party software to even get Windows to communincate with the file system format of Linux. Such software might not even work under Widnows 7 and installing Widnows 7 after the Linux distro you would take the steps i mentioned above to get the boot configuration set up the way you want. Much of the information you are asking about is mainly setup this way due to Window 7 being in Beta. Much of the setup should change before it gets released to the public. For right now they did it for security reasons.~Alex T.~ ~Windows Desktop Experience MVP~

Yes, this is intentional and expected behavior. When the original decision is made to multi boot, you went to <Control Panel> <System> <Advanced Settings (or similar>. From here you can select to (1) multi boot (2) default OS (3) Time to display OS Selection Screen. The default OS will automatically load on an unattended start when no other selection is made before the Selection Screen timeout. This default OS also will have it's "C" drive "hidden" from the otherOSs to avoid any unintended/accidental changes to. You can change the default OS as desired. This is my understanding after reading the technical info available on setting up multi boot.

Alex T said:Carol Haynes said: A hidden boot partition just looks like a really good target for malicious software to aim at! Also given you can only have 4 primary partitions on a hard disk why does Win 7 have to use two of them? I really think they should rethink this particular aspect of the Win 7 install. Let users see the partitions on their disks (unless they specifically choose to hide them themselves). The questions that still remain to be answered are how does Win 7 deal with a FAT32 based OS (some users are still using Win98 because they have apps that are no longer updated and need to use them) and even more critical how easily is Win 7 going to be able to share the boot process with Linux, BSD or even MacOSX on Intel Macs etc.? Windows 7 should deal with FAT32 based OS's the way that Vista does. Windows 7 and the BCD are not going to easily share the boot process with Linux, or Mac OS X. It was only done through 3rd party software with Vista and the BCD has not changed in Windows 7 at this time. If you install Windows 7 after a Linux Distro you can use the 3rd party software that is available to create entries for it with the BCD or you can re-install GRUB. As with the Mac OS X they use Boot Camp to dual boot OS X with Windows and that is all dependent on Apple if they will include support for Windows 7. Carol Haynes said: Thanks for the comments but the question was two fold:Is this an intentional 'feature'?If it is then why?Not being funny but lots of people (for various reasons) have multiboot systems so that they can use an older OS alongside a new OS (if nothing else to combat incompatibilities between the new OS and essential hardware or software). If this is intentional behaviour in Windows 7 it makes sharing data between the original OS and Windows 7 difficult for the non-technical user.I am perfectly happy to go into Disk Management and assign a drive letter but why should this step be required - it has never been needed before?Further if Windows 7 insists on writing data to the primary active partition during set up how will it cope with a system where Linux is installed in 1st place?Finally - why is the partitioning software in the installer so minimalistic? Surely Windows 7 will run from an extended partition (other Windows does) and yet you cannot create an extended partition with the partitioning tool - surely with current large drive sizes it should by default use an existing extended partition or create one ??? Or does MS really expect people to use terrabyte sized drives limited to 4 partitions? At this time yes this was a feature and was intended. They did this as a security measure since this is a Beta and not a completed OS. There was several incidents during the ista Beta where Vista corrupted the partition tables and in turn multi boot systems. So they did this to prevent something like that from happening again. If Linux is installed it wont make much difference. Since you need 3rd party software to even get Windows to communincate with the file system format of Linux. Such software might not even work under Widnows 7 and installing Widnows 7 after the Linux distro you would take the steps i mentioned above to get the boot configuration set up the way you want. Much of the information you are asking about is mainly setup this way due to Window 7 being in Beta. Much of the setup should change before it gets released to the public. For right now they did it for security reasons.~Alex T.~ ~Windows Desktop Experience MVP~Thanks Alex - that has cleared up a lot of questions in my mind (and seems to suggest the hidden partitions are a temporary feature of the beta).I am curious how hiding an OS partition stops partition table corruption? Surely whatever you do during installation you are writing to the partition table and therefore it is capable of corruption - changing the status of an existing partition doesn't seem to me to protect it in any way from corruption - unless you mean data writing within the OS causes partition table corruption ... which would be very strange as the OS shouldn't be doing anything with parttition tables during normal usage.It could be argued that by hiding an existing partition the chance of table corruption is increased because the system has to modify an existing table entry to hide it - which is unneccessary writing to the partition table ???Anyway my questions have been answered - thanks for the help. I have marked your response above as the answer.

I have 5 partitions on my hard drive.XP was installed on C:, i then installed windows 7 on a different partition. thereafter my XP failed to boot; just showed up a blank screen when selected in the OS choices menu at the start..So i re-installed XP on the same partition on which it was installed earlier and it worked properly. but now when i select windows 7 in OS choices menu, it fails to boot and shows a blank screen.In the system configuration utility, under the boot.ini tab, when i click on "check all boot paths", it pops up a window saying "the following line in the boot.ini file does not refer to a valid operating system"-"multi(0)disk(0)partition(5)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate"/noexecut=optin /fastdetect"..Can someone help me out with this...?