I think this is my first time posting on this board, or close to it, but it seemed the best place to ask.
I just completed a much-needed reformat of my system a couple of days ago, including installing Vista in the first partition on the drive and leaving the second one empty and available for whatever OS I feel like dual-booting to now that I don't feel the need to boot into XP anymore (Vista's ran flawlessly for me, and I can always VM XP when I need it).
I've been curious about playing with 64-bit Vista and seeing how well it works for me. I know for some people its software support is very problematic, while for others it works perfectly. Likely due to very different software needs. That's why I knew dual-booting would be safer until I could be confident that any software I need works.
Now my partition structure is moderately unique. My primary hard drive contains four partitions, the first two for OSes, the third contains my documents and most-accessed (and therefore easy-to-fragment) files and is relatively small to make defragmenting easier (and fragmenting less costly in performance), and the final partition is where I install all of my programs as well as keep disc images that I load with Daemon Tools.
When I was dual-booting between XP and Vista, since XP came first, its programs were installed to F:\Program Files, and Vista's were put in F:\Program Files Vista. Now that I have ONLY Vista, they're all going in Program Files on that drive. The question is regarding what to do with Vista 64's Program Files folders. The obvious thing for the main one is to simply do like before and make a different Program Files folder (I did Program Files 64 so far). But what about that (x86) folder? Is there something unique about that folder that alerts Vista to the fact that its contents are 32-bit, and if so, how do I duplicate that on the F drive? Is the name all it takes, or does it need some special sort of modification?
Now I did some Googling on this topic and didn't get too far, but I did find one concerning warning that I was hoping to get some insight on. One forum suggested that having both a 32-bit and 64-bit OS access the same data drive (that would be my E Documents drive and my M Multimedia drive) can cause corruptions and is not advised. Previously I had no problem having XP and Vista (although both 32-bit) share my Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders that were stored on other partitions. Is this truly a problem with 64 vs. 32? If so, that does put a damper in my plans and will leave me less likely to bother with it.
Any light you can shed on these two issues would be greatly appreciated.
I just completed a much-needed reformat of my system a couple of days ago, including installing Vista in the first partition on the drive and leaving the second one empty and available for whatever OS I feel like dual-booting to now that I don't feel the need to boot into XP anymore (Vista's ran flawlessly for me, and I can always VM XP when I need it).
I've been curious about playing with 64-bit Vista and seeing how well it works for me. I know for some people its software support is very problematic, while for others it works perfectly. Likely due to very different software needs. That's why I knew dual-booting would be safer until I could be confident that any software I need works.
Now my partition structure is moderately unique. My primary hard drive contains four partitions, the first two for OSes, the third contains my documents and most-accessed (and therefore easy-to-fragment) files and is relatively small to make defragmenting easier (and fragmenting less costly in performance), and the final partition is where I install all of my programs as well as keep disc images that I load with Daemon Tools.
When I was dual-booting between XP and Vista, since XP came first, its programs were installed to F:\Program Files, and Vista's were put in F:\Program Files Vista. Now that I have ONLY Vista, they're all going in Program Files on that drive. The question is regarding what to do with Vista 64's Program Files folders. The obvious thing for the main one is to simply do like before and make a different Program Files folder (I did Program Files 64 so far). But what about that (x86) folder? Is there something unique about that folder that alerts Vista to the fact that its contents are 32-bit, and if so, how do I duplicate that on the F drive? Is the name all it takes, or does it need some special sort of modification?
Now I did some Googling on this topic and didn't get too far, but I did find one concerning warning that I was hoping to get some insight on. One forum suggested that having both a 32-bit and 64-bit OS access the same data drive (that would be my E Documents drive and my M Multimedia drive) can cause corruptions and is not advised. Previously I had no problem having XP and Vista (although both 32-bit) share my Documents, Music, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders that were stored on other partitions. Is this truly a problem with 64 vs. 32? If so, that does put a damper in my plans and will leave me less likely to bother with it.
Any light you can shed on these two issues would be greatly appreciated.
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