Partition disk for dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7 (shared documents)

Question

I wish to dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7.

I wish to have my documents available from both OSes.

Do I create a single partition and it just works? 2 partitions, one for each OS? 3 partitions, one for each OS and one for the "my documents"?

[EDIT] I used 3 partitions, one for each partition and one for docs which is mapped as a separate drive. Works perfectly. The only think you need to do is hide the other OS partition, ie for Windows XP, hide the Windows 7 partition. You do this from partition manager.

Answer 1

I think you will indeed need a third partition, that would be the easiest.

Windows XP will see Windows 7 partition without problem, so you could use the Win7 partition for your documents. However, unless you change the system partition letter for Windows XP to something else than "C:", you won't be able to access it from 7, as it will mask it, to make the system believe it is actually on the C: partition (even if it is on another), and therefor you won't see the Windows XP one, under 7.

Note that my point of view is based on what I experienced after trying the beta of Windows 7. this behavior could have changed since, or there can be workarounds.

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Depending on what you need the dual boot for, you can also consider installing Windows 7 as the main system, and installing XP on a virtual machine, which would probably make document sharing even easier.

Answer 2

I think all three version do work. If you use the classic standard NTFS file system. But the last one looks like the best. Each OS separated on a partition and a data partition, too.

Answer 3

Here is how I did this with Windows 7 , Mac OSX and Linux

I used a separate documents partition that each OS points to. No matter what OS crashes later I still have access to my documents from an alternate OS

http://teknogeekz.com/blog/?p=475