booDual boot xp: small partition for system volume, possible??

well thats a chunky title.

My situation:
i have a dual install of XP on my laptop [as of yesterday]
the drive is partitioned 100gb drive (C), 20gb drive (E).
each partiton contains an installation of XP.

Desired outcome:
when i boot to the first installation (C), partition (E) should not be readily accessable, this is easily achieved using the disk management utility by removing its drive letter.
When i boot to the second installation (E), partition (C) should not be readily accessable, this is possible using tweakUI and choosing not to display the partition in MY COMPUTER, however typing "C:\" brings up the contents of the partition. its drive letter remains intact, and as such is "addressable".

Problem
i cannot remove the Drive letter of (C) because it is the SYSTEM VOLUME,
i understand this to mean that it has files such as boot.ini and a few other important files on it, and must be accessable at all times.


Proposed solution:
to reformat the HD and create 3 partitions instead of 2
a very small partiton for system volume
plus the two boot partitions.

Question: {finally}
is it possible to create a small partition {perhaps a few MB} and tell
xp installation to use this as system volume, but not to install XP to it?

or if the above is not possible
is it possible to Transfere the Job of System volume to a different partition
after the installation


i hope i have stated this correctly, i'm new to the dual booting thing and have only discovered what a SYSTEM VOLUME is earlier today!!
all inputs appreciated
Thanks Jim.

How about adding security and permissions to both drives. So Admin on partition C does not have the same rights and Admin on Partition E.

I would STRONGLY Recomend NOT moving the System Volume regardless of what anyone else says lol.

May I ask....Why?

The logical volume where the running Windows instance is installed is the system volume and is always designated as drive C.

If you're just trying to block out file system access to the other partition, you can achieve this by removing the E drive letter in both installations. Remember that the drive letters are not universal — they are only valid within the scope of each installation. Thus, C in instance 1 will be E in instance 2 and vice versa (depending on what D is).

Quote:

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The logical volume where the running Windows instance is installed is the system volume and is always designated as drive C.

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hey penagate
i'm afraid to say that both partitions appear with the same drive letters no matter which installation is booted.
The SYSTEM VOLUME is always C, the BOOT volume varies from C to E depending on weather XP is booted from C or E
it is easy to remove drive letter (E) when the OS is booted from (C) because (E) in this case is neither the boot volume NOR the system volume.

however when the system is booted using the installation on (E),
drive letter (E) cannot be removed because it is the BOOT volume, drive letter (C) cannot be removed because it is the SYSTEM volume.

what i need is another partition (F) which is designated ONLY as the system volume,
an easy way around this is to create a tripple boot of XP, the first installation on the first partition would act as the SYSTEM volume.
but i would rather not create a third installation, just a partition to act as SYSTEM voume
As i understand it a multi boot system will only ever have one system volume.

^^^
please correct me if i'm not correct on the details

also if anyone knows if its possiblel or not? lettuice know

Oh. That's never been the case in my experience. I'm afraid I don't know how to resolve that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by penagate

The logical volume where the running Windows instance is installed is the system volume and is always designated as drive C.

If you're just trying to block out file system access to the other partition, you can achieve this by removing the E drive letter in both installations. Remember that the drive letters are not universal — they are only valid within the scope of each installation. Thus, C in instance 1 will be E in instance 2 and vice versa (depending on what D is).

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this is incorrect. My sister's dual-booting computer boots to d drive and c contains dos files.