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With my nice new shiny shiny laptop, because I wanted to multiboot it I’d partitoned the drive with the OSX disk utility. However, while Windows7 will indeed recognise a (secondary) GPT partitoned disk, it appears to require a hybrid MBR/GPT for installing, which means in Windows-land you’re pretty-much limited to the 4 primary partitions for OS installs – although I have read of a special version ofgptsync that allows you to select any 4 GPT partitions for your MBR. Previously on my Toshiba tablet I’d kept separate MBR extended partitons for my DJ/VJ data & extra storage. On the new Vaio the easiest partitoning scheme has turned out to be have a really big Windows partiton, with OSX before it and Linux after (partition #1 is the hidden EFI that disk utility creates). The first thing I tried was the old DOS command of subst, to mount a directory as a drive, to keep the disk tidy and also ease the transfer of the video/audio apps which expect the VJ files on D:, music on E: & storage on F:. However this could result in a big live recording filling up the system drive so I decided to use vhd’s to keep my VJ, DJ & other data contiguous and separate. Then I discovered that creating the virtual disks doesn’t keep the mounting of them persistent over reboots. A quick google found a couple of methods for auto-mounting them, but these required the use of powershell scripts and an old-school batch file to call that. But there should be a way that doesn’t require writing anytghing! (Is what I thought to myself) and there is. The ‘gizmo’ utilities allow the mounting of a wide range of virtual disks, including our friend the Microsoft VHD file. What is more, there’s a checkbox on the mounting dialog that says ‘remount at boot’. Job done! 😉 It does indeed do what it says, although it does take a few more seconds aftger booting for the Virtual drives to show up.