Question: I have a 400 GB hard disk. I want to know if is there any way to divide it in two partition A and B And make them in a way logically isolated from each other! ?have a Windows 7 in partition A and a Windows XP in partition B. And in each windows ,the OS see only a 200 GB hard disk (I mean in disk management, I see 200 GB as total space)
I mean if is there any way to create a system with one 400 GB hard disk behave exactly like a system with two separate 200 GB hard disks?
FYI : Why? Because if a windows affected by a virus, another one remain safe. For example I’ll use internet in Windows-7 Only, and I do my important works in Windows XP!
Answer: If you are satisfied with 200GB volumes then: Yes. ?
You can partition the disk such that the disk has two 200GB partitions. Add a bootloader which sets one partition to have type NTFS (0x06) and one to another type. Then boot into the 0x06 partition.
The result is that windows will see a 400GB disk with two partitions. One partition will be recognised (the one you are booted from), one will be of type unknown and will be unused.
We used to do this at work with something called XOSL. However this did not work well for us since people tended to share USB pen drives between both OS’s and still managed to infect both partitions.
So yes, it can work. But beware of shared mail, shared pen drives, shared SD cards etc etc.