XP Pro and Vista issue

[dc2acgsr99]

I currently have Vista Business and XP Pro running on a dual boot setup. The problem I am having is with sharing my secondary hard drive with the two systems. While the drive letter is 'J' on the XP OS, the drive letter is 'C' on the Vista OS. Relevance in this issue? I am trying to install my application software and such on this drive and link it through the start menu's in either OS. Problem is the drive letters need to be changed for the 'Target' and 'Start In' for the programs to load in each OS every time. Solutions I have tried thus far is FAT32 and NTFS but neither will allow the drive letter to be consistent between the two OS's. Am I shooting at a non existent target here? Program used to do my partitioning and such is Partition Magic 8, would its incobatibly with Vista be the reason the drive letter wont stay the same? Any ideas are needed as I am running out of them, Thanks.

 

[PC eye]

When booting with any version of Windows the default drive letter seen is C unless something went wrong during the installation. To see the correct drive letter set you need to install a separate copy of any programs installed while running each version.

What you are trying there is to see one installation work on both which will fail each time since each has it's own system registry and set of folders created. Also you have to make sure that the applications tried are not specific to one version only like being written for XP exclusively and refusing to even install on the newer version.

 

[dc2acgsr99]

XP is on dive 'D' and Vista is on drive 'G' and the reason for that is I used Partion Magic to partion out my primary hard drive into two primary partions (D and G) for the OS's. After that I used the same program to format my secondary hard drive and its letter was 'J'. But if neithor OS is installed on a drive 'C' and the second hard drive was given the letter 'J' why is Vista, and only Vista, giving this drive 'C' in place of the 'J' causing this conflict. And the programs used to test this are Firefox and IrfanView witch both work on eithor Vista or XP.

 

[PC eye]

When in Windows you always see that as C and other partitons/drives will then fall under different numbers. The simple reason is that while in one OS that is default. It won't matter what Partition Magic or any other drive tool labels the drive as the OS you are in at the moment will still be the default for the entire system.

If I was booted in XP installed onto the first sata while Vista is on the one ide drive here Vista would be seen as the F drive since I'm running two optical drives. While in Vista now XP becomes the F drive. See how that works?

It wouldn't matter if XP was on the first, second, thiird, or fourth primary since I set each as the F while running the other. That had to be set manually since one of the optical drives is a sata model not an ide to see Windows automatically assign each letter by order there. This is where the Disk Management tool is used while in each version to arrange the drive letters for that one alone.