Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 10:42 pm
The boot manager I was going to try is GAG.
It allows you to boot to OSs on second, third hard drives and will hide all other primary partitions (so your Win7 won't see XP, etc), but extended partitions stay visible. That way, you can have a D: drive that does show up in both for file sharing between OSs. But that could allow viruses to spread between the two.
I know changing gears completely may not be very appealing. But the directions for GAG were short and sweet and it might not take that long to try it out.
As far as your drive letters changing. . . that could be the problem. I know with NT (and it looks like Win7), the boot.ini had disk info in it as to how the OS would load. And if a drive letter changes, and/or some other stuff (been too long), it will keep the OS from loading. So, this might be a clue. . . You'd have to read up on the purpose of the boot.ini (which XP doesn't seem to use) and stuff like that. However, when you said it changed the drive letter, that set off alarms for me.
It allows you to boot to OSs on second, third hard drives and will hide all other primary partitions (so your Win7 won't see XP, etc), but extended partitions stay visible. That way, you can have a D: drive that does show up in both for file sharing between OSs. But that could allow viruses to spread between the two.
I know changing gears completely may not be very appealing. But the directions for GAG were short and sweet and it might not take that long to try it out.
As far as your drive letters changing. . . that could be the problem. I know with NT (and it looks like Win7), the boot.ini had disk info in it as to how the OS would load. And if a drive letter changes, and/or some other stuff (been too long), it will keep the OS from loading. So, this might be a clue. . . You'd have to read up on the purpose of the boot.ini (which XP doesn't seem to use) and stuff like that. However, when you said it changed the drive letter, that set off alarms for me.