Windows 7 Installed Windows 7 and now can't seen Vista?

skattrbrain

New Member
Installed Windows 7 and now can't seen other partitions?

I originally had Vista Ultimate installed and created a separate partition to install Windows 7 on. After the installation went smoothly, I tried to open My Computer, only to find that I can no longer see the Vista partition. Anyone else have this problem and is there a way to fix it?
 
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You will find the answer on several threads in the forum but:
Open Administrative tools - Computer Managment - Disk Management and right clcik your Vista partition. Allocate it a letter, which will mount it. If you then logout or reboot, you will see the Vista partition.
 
somehow your Win 7 partition is now set as the active one and the VISTA partition will be hidden.
Restore the MBR (Master boot record on track 0 and then use a boot manager to perform your dual booting.
You can't have more than 1 active partition on a single disk and Windows will allow only 4 primary partitions per disk.
That's why a Boot mamanger is often in a small separate partition which is like a mini OS -- this gets loaded by the bootstrap loader and can then select the OS you want to load.

A get around in your case would also be to load GRUB (a Linux boot loader) but you need to fiddle around with partitions here.

You can google for a few free bootloaders .

Cheers
jimbo
 
Booting and other Functions

We been discussing this on MS TechNet and it is highly recommended that users not place Betas to a dual boot with main user operating systems. Especially with windows7 since it will expire and we will not be able to just upgrade this to a working OS after the expiration date.

This means when one uninstalls Windows7 they will have to restore the Boot Manager MBR for their Vista or XP system. From just reading posts within this forum I see that a lot of people are going to have this problem in the future when 7 expires. Just remember if one has the XP or Vista disc restoring the MBR is a breeze which is discussed in another part of the forum.
 
Hey guys, I hate to bring this back up again-
But I've got windows 7 installed on my computer.
Just windows 7, build 7000, 64 bit.
However, I've got a Vista 32 bit disk. And I want
to dual-boot them. Windows 7 is already on there,
but if I dual-boot, I should be able to run a boat-ton
more programs that Windows 7 isn't compatible yet. Right?
 
There's a great little application called Easy BCD (download from Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies ). Use it to reinstate the Vista bootloader and place the OS choices in a menu for start up. I used it to dual boot my desktop with Vista/Win7 and my laptop Vista/XP. Both operating systems are located on the same hard drive (drive was partitioned first of course)
 
I ditched my dual boot as I found there was nothing Vista x64 would run which W7 didn't other than daemon tools... I now use ultra ISO which works a treat so I wiped my dual boot and just run W7. I think W7 is very compatible so I would jump straight in and then set up a virtual machine with XP for anything which you cant get running...
 
You can choose boot options and the OS to boot as primary in Control Panel > System > (Additional Options). If there's no boot sector on your Vista partition, try adding it wth the BCD - but first try other methods !

Eay BCD is a great tool, but I also recommend you iReboot by the same NeoSmart Technologies.
 
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