Want to de-assign a drive letter

[gbhall]

I have a dual-boot system with Win 7 and XP-pro (on a second HDD). There are two other partitions which I use between both OS's and have Win 7 designations D: for data and E: for setups/backups.

Win 7 has the usual primary,hidden,system,boot partition named WinRE and in windows 7 it is not seen and not assigned a drive letter. So far, so normal.

However, when I boot into XP-pro on the second drive, then unfortunately the WinRe partition is seen, and being the first partition on the 1st HDD, gets assigned drive letter D: That letter cannot be changed, so I can't actually have the same two partitions as D: and E: in both OS's apparently. Or is there a way to make the WinRe partition invisible to XP-pro (currently unchangeable assignment D: ?

 

[SNGX1275]

I would think you can just right click on it and change the drive letter there. Are you saying you can't right click on D in Disk Management in XP and change it to something like X?

 

[gbhall]

Oh, you can try, but you get a message saying it cannot be changed because it is a system and boot partition. This is repeated in several MS tech notes, plus several partition managers I've tried have property values greyed out for the partition, like rename, hide, change letter, change type, change format etc, etc.

 

[DelJo63]

Boot DLA can not be reassigned - - I recall they are in the registry. A dual boot system then has TWO registries and TWO MBRs to struggle with.

 

[gbhall]

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