two OSes sharing ONE storage drive?

giantbucket

Dignified
BANNED
i'm going to dual boot WinXP and Win8.1 but for storing data like games and other stuff, i have only one hard drive. rather than partition it and be "stuck" with whatever size i guess at up front, i'd like to simply have separate top-level folders for each OS, and then let them use as much space as they need.

is this likely to cause problems with file permissions or "chkdsk" or any of that? for example, for my steam games, i'd make a top-level folder called "SteamXP" and another called "Steam8.1" and have each OS dump its content accordingly.

safe? corrupt?
 
You need separate partition for bootloader and each OS needs it's own separate partition.
Otherwise you'll have serious problems with shared folder names like windows,program files and others.
After those 3 partitions you can make one large, that both OSes can share for user data/user program storage.