Remove XP from Vista Dual boot

MAJJ

Hi Folks,

Originally I had XP and Vista on separate partitions on a single 320 GB SATA harddrive. I have now installed a second 1TB SATA hard drive on my machine

I then used Acronis Disk migrator to move the C: XP Mce and Vista partitions over to the new drive.

I verifed this was correct,formatted the old drive and have moved my required data back to the old drive.

I used EASY BCD to remove the boot entry for XP so the machine boots straight to Vista.

I now want to format the XP partition and am having issues, in Computer Manager it is still fagged as the active partition and I cannot ,probably should not, format it.


I have a backup of my data and can if I need to reinstall vista but really would prefer not to.

I have searched on line for the answer and that's where I found EASY BCD but I am stuck.

Can anyone advise how I can remove my XP partition and make Vista the active partition?


Thanks,
Majj

Anti

Easiest thing to do here would be to boot from your vista dvd, and delete the xp partition and extend it onto the vista one of you want. This way you wont get any of the usual "windows can not/will not allow you to do this bollix"

PaddyTheNth

Looks like DiskPart can make active partitions inactive. IIRC Partition Magic might be able to also.

MAJJ

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the suggestions.

Manties - if you could I would appreciate if you can elaborate on the specific steps I need. I've been winging it so far and been lucky I reckon, don't want to bugger up at what I hope is the last hurdle!

Thanks,
Majj

Anti

Okay first steps are:

1, go into the bios and select yoru dvd drive as the first boot device
2, go through the usual crap on the vista dvd, country, region etc etc.
3, you will now come to a scree where you will be asked where you want to install to, simplly highlight the partition xp is on and hit delete. This will only take a few seconds. Now highlight the other partition (vista) and click on extend, now you can allocate the rest of the space over. Or you can leave the partition, boot into windows and do yoru thang in disk management.

MAJJ

Cheers Manties,

Will try it out later when i'm home and update this post for others.

Thanks,
Majj

MAJJ

Well hasn't quite gone my way, achieved buggered status

Knew there were risks associated and can still see my drives using the Vista disk.

So managed to delete the XP partition. Went to reboot and now have a disk boot failure.

When I try the system disk and go to install just to check what shows up I can see the partition that Vista is on and I can see it is a logical partition.

I am stuck and would appreciate any help.

Thanks

byte

Not too knowledgeable on this, but sounds like it may be something to do with the Master Boot Record (MBR), which AFAIK, is what BIOS looks at first, before booting OS.

MAJJ

Thanks Byte, after a bit of research I too think that, MBR, this may be my issue but
that as far as I got.........anyone?

Webmonkey

Yeah MBR has to be written to again and yes it is the first (512? bytes) that is an intial entry point to boot the boot loader. If you go to the recovery console of the XP/Vista? CD and type fixmbr and fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild. Them commands should sort booting for you back into Vista. I havn't done it with vista but suppose it same with XP.

byte

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392 might help.

MAJJ

Thanks for all the replies.

Been looking at those commands and that link.

Have ran /fixmbr and it ran successfully. Ran /fixboot and it tells me 'element not found' so something is up there.

When I run /bdcrebuild it finds drive a 'boot file' on drive e: this is the old drive.

Going to have to bow out until tomorrow evening. But wanted to update for those helping me. Thanks for your time and I'll check in tomorrow.

Saw this thread and may look at diskpart that paddythe9th suggested.
http://thevistaforums.com/lofiversion/index.php/t17945.html

Thanks,
majj

Webmonkey

Have you got RAID disks, appently RAID 0 causes problems as MBR spread over 2 disks. Check your BIOS settings and ensure RAID and not IDE?

PaddyTheNth

Doesn't sound good dude.

Should have thought of this earlier, but....I assume XP was installed first?

I'm not sure, but even though you removed XP's boot entry using EasyBCD or whatever it was, I reckon the BIOS or bootloader or whatever handles it is still looking for boot.ini on the first (XP) partition...which is now gone.

You could try reinstalling XP, or even Vista again, on the first partition, and manually edit its boot.ini to add the record for the Vista installation once you've got it installed.

Have you got backups of your documents on the Vista install?

MAJJ

Thanks again for the responses, am a bit lost without the help I am getting here so I am very grateful.


Webmonkey - no raid is not active or at least it shouldn't be I will verify later

PaddyTheNth - yep XP was installed orginally and then Vista on a second partition. That was the state of the old disk before I copied this scenario to the new disk, blew away the old disk and restored my data (music/pics etc) to the old disk.

So I have my data backed up on a separate disk and an ext disk. I can format the lot and resinstall Vista but really would prefer not as this is used as a HTPC and took a while to get this point.

If I take your suggestion I reinstall (Vista and I don't have XP anymore) onto the first partition what do I do next.

I would then have Vista on both partitons. If I get you right I should then have a bootable machine. What do I do next and how do I make the Vista that I want active rather than the fresh install?

Thanks in advance,
majj

PaddyTheNth

MAJJ wrote: »

Thanks again for the responses, am a bit lost without the help I am getting here so I am very grateful.


Webmonkey - no raid is not active or at least it shouldn't be I will verify later

PaddyTheNth - yep XP was installed orginally and then Vista on a second partition. That was the state of the old disk before I copied this scenario to the new disk, blew away the old disk and restored my data (music/pics etc) to the old disk.

So I have my data backed up on a separate disk and an ext disk. I can format the lot and resinstall Vista but really would prefer not as this is used as a HTPC and took a while to get this point.

If I take your suggestion I reinstall (Vista and I don't have XP anymore) onto the first partition what do I do next.

I would then have Vista on both partitons. If I get you right I should then have a bootable machine. What do I do next and how do I make the Vista that I want active rather than the fresh install?

Thanks in advance,
majj

The suggestion of installing an OS on the first partition was really just to get you back to the point you were at before you deleted the XP partition.

You'd install as normal to the first partition, then manually edit the boot.ini file to point to the OS in the second partition...I haven't done that in Vista but I reckon there'll be examples online which we could play around with...but I still couldn't say for sure how to make the second partition the only active one without running into the same boot issue you got when you deleted the XP partition You need someone with much better knowledge of bootup arcania than I have.

TBH I think that the least painful option for you is going to be to wipe the whole lot and start over as you have your docs backed up, reinstalling the OS you want to use on the first partition.

MAJJ

Thanks for the help so far.

I thought I'd write this out to help someone to help me. Still clinging to the hope I can get my Vista partition bootable.

The view of the disks from the Vista repair DVD :


When Installing Vista - this what I see proposed
Disk 0 Partition 1 859GB Free 859GB Primary C: This is where XP was.
Disk 0 Partition 2 72.6GB Free 55.7GB Logical E: This is where Vista is
Disk 1 Partition 1 298.1GB Free 186.1GB Primary This is where my data is


Using diskpart.exe I see the following :

Two disks
Disk 0 This has the boot issues
Disk 1 This has my data

Disk 0 This disk contained XP and Vista
Partition 1 Primary 859GB Used to have XP
Partition 0 Extended 73GB My working vista installation
Partition 2 Logical 73GB My working vista installation

Partition 0 and 2 are one and the same. I don't know why this shows up twice?

Using diskpart I tried to set Partition 2 to active - result - cannot be marked as active because of it's type.

Using diskpart I tried to set Partition 0 to active - result - Not a data partition. Only data partitions can be marked as active or inactive.

When I run bootrec /scan os - it report an OS on E:\ where Vista is.

But then when I run bootrec /rebuildbcd - it again finds E:\Windows , prompts me to add insatllation
and comes up with 'Element Not Found'.



One more thing, When I do a startup repair and look at the results - it tells me 'the partition table has no
valid system partition'.

Can anyone help me?


Thanks,
majj

MAJJ

Went for the nuclear option and reinstalled, thanks to all for the help. Acornis is my next step