Hi RC,

Happy Thanksgiving (belated) to you also....snow here too.

I was primarily a replaceable drive user for the o/s with a second
internal data drive. There were occasional forays into the multiple
partitions mostly for dual/triple booting. Once I gave up XP that need
dissipated rapidly.

Currently I've a 1TB and 2 TB (both SATA6) in this UEFI i7-4770 Z87
Sabertooth running Win7 Pro Sp1 64-bit. The 2TB first primary partition
(250GB) is empty with the balance for data and images. Everything from
both drives is backed up externally.

One of these days I might get around to wiping the 2TB, disconnecting
the 1TB power and Sata connector and installing Win8.1 Pro using GPT to
learn more about the multiple GPT installed partitions (Win RE, System,
MSR, Windows, Recovery Image, etc.)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../hh824839.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.../gg463525.aspx

Yes, Win RE is Windows Recovery Environment

For the time being I'm comfortable with Win7 Pro on this system and
Win8.1 Pro on the laptop.

--
...winston



R. C. White wrote:
Hi, Winston.

Yes, I was curious about your "Boomer is Missing" post. My first
thought was "Boomer! Sooner!" ;^}

You caught up quickly on those multiple partitions, and then zoomed on
ahead into the UEFI and Win7/8 changes. After getting comfy with the
WinNT4 to WinXP system, it took me a "generation" to transition to
Vista's BCD system. When Win7 introduced the new partition arrangement,
I didn't bother to learn it very well; I just kept using the multiple
partitions on multiple drives that I had learned when I first started
dual-booting with WinNT4/Windows 95 back in '98. Each of my bootable
HDDs has a small (10 GB is SMALL?) primary partition as a System
Partition, with the rest of the disk in an extended partition divided
into multiple logical drives. These logical drives get
deleted/recreated/reformatted/renamed/re-lettered from time to time.
This was especially true during the years of beta-testing Vista and
Win7. Since my MVP days are over, I haven't been as energetic in
creating and maintaining all those drives. (I'm using only 16 drive
letters now. g With 4 internal HDDs, a 3 TB USB3 external disk,
booting mostly from a 120 GB SSD. Plus removable USB sticks and SD
cards now and then.) My year-old mobo does have UEFI and I did have to
learn enough about GPT to access the full 3 TB, but that was a one-time
exercise - which I'd have to relearn to do it again.

But I haven't bought a pre-configured computer in over 20 years so I
have never used Microsoft's new partition scheme. All this discussion
of the Recovery Partition and such (like special partitions from Dell,
HP, etc.) simply goes over my head. (What's Windows RE? Recovery
Environment?) When I need to know all that, I know whom to ask. ;)

Happy Thanksgiving! This morning we had our first mild freeze, about 29
degrees.

RC