Dual boot, single drive, encryption

April 12, 2009 12:33 PM

Dual booting Win XP and Win 7 off the same disk... I have already used TrueCrypt to encrypt the primary Win XP Partition. Anything I should know before attempting to do the Win 7 partition? I don't want to mess up any boot loaders.

I want to proceed carefully here. I have already encrypted my Windows XP partition (the same partition that has Windows Boot Manager on it), and now I need to encrypt my other partition which contains Windows 7.

Is there anything I need to know before I proceed with this? I am assuming when I am booted into Win7 I just choose the "encrypt partition" option from TC.... I just dont want to mess up the TC boot loader that is already on my system due to the encryption job I made on Win XP.

posted by yoyoceramic to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Well, I'm dual booting Vista Home Basic and Windows 7 beta and it went smooth as silk, and this was my first dual boot ever. I didn't encrypt either partition at all. Is there any particular privacy reason that you need to encrypt your partitions? As far as the Windows 7 beta/RC, you're getting the beta of the Ultimate version and as I understand it, it comes with Bitlocker Drive Encryption.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:44 PM on April 12, 2009

Creating a dualboot with 2 encrypted Windows system partitions needs a bit of tinkering, there's a quite a few threads on the Truecrypt forum on how to do it, e.g. this one. Extended discussion of multiboot issues here.

I tried yyzyyz's solution and it worked fine, though I installed the next Win 7 beta build on a seperate harddisk and now chose the boot disk via BIOS start menu, which is much more convenient to set up.
posted by starzero at 4:41 AM on April 13, 2009