How to hide Vista partition while in Win7 and vice versa

karen123

karen123

New Member
Started with Vista Home Premium 64-bit (partition c:smile:. Installed Win7 Pro 64-bit on partition labeled f: Found this forum and the EasyBCD 2.0 Beta builds and successfully changed my boot drive to f: Added the Vista installation back to the boot menu. So now I can dual-boot successfully. What I would like to do, however, is hide the vista partition when in win7 and vice versa. I tried just changing the drive letters in Disk Management, but it would not allow me to change the drive letter of the win7 partition (I was booted into win7 at the time). Is there a way to do this without using a proprietary boot manager?
 
Shrink one of the partitions and make a small partition for the boot files. Use EasyBCD to move the boot files to the new partition. Reboot and you should be able to remove the drive letters in the opposite system on both systems.
 
You can't (and shouldn't) change the partition letter of the booted system from the letter it assigned itself when it installed. You'll break the system.
(disk letters aren't "real", they're just entries in the registry of the running system, hence no particular agreement between differernt OSs about what any partition is called) You can change them yourself (within any running Windows) provided the partition doesn't have a "boot" "system" or "page" flag.
Bootmgr (Vista and W7 boot manager) doesn't have any facility to hide partitions.
You could do so if you switch to Grub4Dos as the boot manager, or you could do something similar by setting each OS offline in the registry of the other.
Here's how to do it to hide Longhorn systems from XP (to protect their restore points). It's not necessary to hide Longhorns from each other, but this technique should work in any Windows if you want to do so for reasons of your own.
 
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