Hi I'm trying to set my computer to dual boot from Windows 7 and Vista but I have some serious problems especially with Windows 7 turning the other hard drives into unallocated space.
From what I gather after reading on the net about dual booting with Windows 7 and Vista, it appears that this will work properly if Windows 7 is installed when Vista is present on another partition so that Windows 7 becomes aware about Vista. The problem with this is that in my experience this also requires the computer running with both systems available all the time. If for some reason one of the systems is not available during startup, next time dual boot becomes a problem. In my case I unplugging the disk with Windows 7, started the computer with Vista, and when I plugged back Windows 7 again, Windows 7 was not able to boot anymore and I wasn't able to fix that but reinstall Windows 7 again.
I decided to use a third party boot program BootIt NG hoping that it will prevent this kind of problems. Now dual boot seems to work fine even after unplugging and plugging one of the systems but I got a problem with Windows 7 installing device drivers for the inactive hard drives which makes the hard drives unallocated disk space.
In details this is what happened.
I had Vista and Win7 installed separately on different hard drives. The installations were created without the other system being present. Vista was installed long time ago and it works all the time fine with all additional hard drives. Windows 7 was just installed and right after the installation it also worked fine with all additional hard drives without any device drivers installations reported.
Following the manual, I installed BootIt NG on the two hard drives with Vista and Windows 7. The manual doesn't say that I have to install it on each hard drive - I gathered that it will work just fine when it is installed on the drive that is set as the boot drive in the BIOS of my mobo, but I decided it won't hurt to have it on both drives just in case. What happened is that after I booted from Vista and then back from Windows 7, it reported device drivers were installed requiring restart. After the restart all hard drives except the system one didn't show in My Computer and in the Disk Management they were listed as unallocated disk space. I turned off the computer and booted from Vista. The hard drives were just fine again.
In the past I had a similar experience with an external USB hard drive. For several years I used it only with one XP computer. The hard drive came brand new and was factory setup to plug and play. No partitioning or formatting was needed and no third party programs were used. Later when I got a new computer with Vista, the first time I plugged the USB hard drive in it, Vista automatically installed a device driver for the USB drive requiring restart. After the restart the hard drive was missing from My Computer and in the Disk Management it was listed as a disk with all of its space unallocated. When I plugged it back to the XP computer no device driver was automatically installed but the drive was no longer in My Computer and listed as unallocated space in the Disk Management. I managed to get to the data by disassembling the USB box, taking the disk out of it, and plugging it as an internal IDE hard disk. When I put it back in the external USB box, formatted the drive, and allocated its space using Vista, I was never able to use that external USB hard drive back with the XP computer. Since then I avoid using that USB hard drive with different Windows operating systems. Because of this I'm also scared to use other USB hard drives with different Windows Systems.
I will greatly appreciate any help with this.