Hide Partitions

Can I use Disk Director to hide my Vista partition from my 2 XP partitions while still being able to boot into all 3?

Thanks
Mark

 

Yes, you can use DD to hide your Vista partition from XP. This assumes that the Vista partition is not the booting partition. If it is the booting partition, you may run into some problems. You will also have to manually unhide it every time you want to boot Vista.

Another option, if you just don't want the Vista partition showing up in My Computer, is to use Disk Management to unassign the drive letter for the partition.

 

Thanks for the reply. The Vista partition is my boot partition so I'm not going to play around with that. I am really just looking for ways to keep XP from deleting Vista's restore points. Right now I use a registry fix from Microsoft that does work but I was looking for an alternative. Again, Thanks.

Mark

 

Mark and Paul:

Hiding the booting partition may work. I think it's worth a try.

I am currently booting Vista from a hidden partition. Vista's bootmgr and BCD work fine from a hidden partition. However, I'm not sure what will happen if ntldr and boot.ini are in a hidden partition. I recall accidentally hiding my XP partition and booting it once. It did start to boot and got to the Windows XP splash screen. Eventually it produced an error message and stopped. But it did start to boot, so this might work.

 

If it causes problems could I use a DD boot CD to unhide?

Thanks
Mark

 

Yes. That'll work.

 

The only question I have then is if you hide the Vista partion how do you boot to it?

Thanks
Mark

 

Mark:

You don't want to try booting Vista when its partition is hidden. But you should be able to get the boot manager to start from a hidden Vista partition. Then you can try booting from there to an unhidden XP partition.

The case that I was describing is on my system. I have a separate boot partition that is hidden and contains the Vista boot files (bootmgr and the \Boot folder). My Vista system partition is unhidden when I boot into it, but the boot partition is hidden.