Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Windows Vista partition may disappear

Came across this interesting KB article
"The partition that hosts Windows Vista may disappear if you use Windows XP to create a partition on a computer that has both Windows XP and Windows Vista installed"
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=931854

SYMPTOMS
If you use Microsoft Windows XP to create a new partition on a computer that has both Windows XP and Windows Vista installed, the partition that hosts Windows Vista may disappear.
CAUSE
This problem may be caused by a error in Logical Disk Manager. If the partition that hosts Windows Vista was created during the installation of Windows Vista, a 1-megabyte (MB) alignment boundary is created on the partition. This alignment boundary differs from the alignment boundary that is created by Windows XP. Therefore, when you use Windows XP to create a new partition, the different alignments may cause this problem.
WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, do not use Windows XP to create a partition on a computer that also has Windows Vista installed.

I also had XP and Vista installed on dual boot, but I let Vista to do the formatting of the partition on which it was to be installed.

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