Allan, no need to apologise - I immediately realised you were taking a friendly poke at Patio and his comment about his memory.
Regrettably my memory now gives me the choice of deciding whether to laugh or cry ! !
I choose to laugh.
I think I was guilty of premature excitement.
I panicked when I saw in XP Windows Explorer that a partition "Windows 7" had taken squatter's rights over drive letter "F" which belongs to the external drive I rarely connect. Taking the screenshots of Disc management it is not so bad after all.
Last week is still in a mist of forgetfulness, but I now remember that on Saturday I created the 20 GB partition for Oracle VM Virtual Box to accommodate a W7 "installation", and I allocated letter M:\ so XP would still be able to use the drive letters already assigned to the external drive partitions. Regrettably Virtual W7 took 1 minute to actually launch Windows Explorer. Virtual W7 was in a stupor, almost none of the processor cycles did any work for me. When I shut it down it almost shut - then told me there were 16 updates that it would first install and it took me 90 minutes past my bed time waiting.
On Monday I gave up on Virtual W7 and purged drive M:\ to give a real W7 a home for a proper installation, and that worked well. Instantly updated and Windows Explorer quite rapid. Then Acronis was installed to create backup images and for that purpose a 15 GB partition was added. That was where I made my mistake.
I created the 20 GB partition with Partition Wizard 5.0 running under XP, and I seized the opportunity to give it letter M:\ so that the external drive would still have all the letters previously used. My mistake was that I failed to reboot the system from W7 and into XP to add the 15 GB images partition, in which case I would have allocated letter N:\. Instead I used the Partition Wizard Boot disc which of course gives no opportunity to assign a drive letter.
I now realise that W7 did not "steal" letter F:\ - it was XP having one of my "senior moments" and forgetting that F:\ was (at least in my view) supposed to be reserved for the external drive, and when it saw a new 15 GB partition it seized the first letter in the alphabet which appeared to be out of use.
A few months after I bought the external drive it lost everything. I do not know why it died. Fortunately my son told me that drive letters can get lost and Disc Management might fix it so I did not have to post it back to Play.com - He was right. Trying to remember which letters had been assigned to which partition sizes was a challenge to my memory, and once I got it right I modified all the labels to remind me if I every suffered the same fate again.
Hence you will see in sshot-174.gif that what were drives J:\ and K:\ are still correct, but disc 1 drives F:\ G:\, and I:\ have all been renamed.
N.B. XP uses Acronis v11 which has put 120 GB of images on drive I:\.
Acronis is a bit touchy at the best of times, and will not be amused that drive I:\ is now a mere 60 GB with no images ! !
Long story short :-
Premature panic;
W7 as installed fully compatible with XP,
even though Suzanne's IPOD is drive F:\ as seen by W7, whilst XP always has and will call it drive S:\
W7 accepted as Drive K:\ a new 15 GB partition which XP had never seen or allocated a letter to.
Now that XP has seen the new 15 GB partition it has accepted it as Drive F:\.
W7 seems to work the same since XP called the 15 GB partition F:\,
so I sincerely hope that it will be just as tolerant if I now tell XP it should no longer be F:\ but N:\
Please confirm that I should be lucky, or explain what could go wrong.
Regards
Alan
[recovering disk space - old attachment deleted by admin]
