Dual Boot Problem

[Going Bald]

This thread raises an interesting question. Do you have to have the System Reserved partition to dual boot with Lion? I installed my W7 without one. I believe I can create one after-the-fact but do I need to?

The system reserved partition is not needed unless you encrypt your HD. Otherwise, it holds the system recovery files to use the install disk recovery tools to fix a Win7 HD. Personally, if disk encryption is not used, I would eliminate it - I would rather re-install than try to repair a corrupted disk. You can prevent it being created with this method: http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-av ... tallation/

 

[SHPMac]

The system reserved partition is not needed unless you encrypt your HD. Otherwise, it holds the system recovery files to use the install disk recovery tools to fix a Win7 HD. Personally, if disk encryption is not used, I would eliminate it - I would rather re-install than try to repair a corrupted disk. You can prevent it being created with this method: http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-av ... tallation/

GB: Thanks. As I wrote in another thread my installation scheme involves: 1) installing W7 on a 2 partition HDD (one partition for the OS and programs and the other for Users, ProgramData); 2) imaging the OS partition (once everything is running smoothly); then 3) using the UniBeast dual-boot-on-one drive method to install OS Lion and W7 on an SSD but modified so that instead of actually installing W7 on the SSD, I'll "recover" the OS partition image I made in step 2 to it. I've finished steps one and two. Because I created the 2 partitions for the HDD before I installed W7 in step one (I did that because I wanted to control the offset), I do not have a System Reserved partition as part of my W7 install. All of the boot info presumably resides on my OS partition. But, if Chimera will still recognize it and boot the OS, then I should be OK. (In fact, it might be a little more elegant because I won't have to "hide" the OS partition in Chimera and rename the System Reserved partition so that it looks nice).