How to move dual boot partitions?

[Tiny Tim]

My laptop drive is partitioned as follows....

C: = Windows XP MCE 2005
D: = Data
E: = Vista Ultimate

Vista is my preferred OS but I still have to boot to XP, in order to print,
because HP refuse to develop drivers for my fairly expensive (£280 when I
bought it) Bluetooth printer. I don't print very often so I have no
intention of buying a new printer. I like wireless printing in any case.

The thing is that now Vista is installed on the slowest sectors of the drive
while XP is on the fastest so I'd like to swap around the physical locations
of the two OS partitions.

I'm familiar with Norton Ghost and I'm quite happy making partition images
on the D: partition but I do not know what impact it will have on booting
the machine if I physically move the partitions about. I'm quite happy to
keep XP partition labeled as C: and Vista as E: if that makes things easier
but I'd be just as happy to relabel them (although I suspect that would
wreck the registry and any other areas where path data is stored).

I really don't have a clue when it comes to MBRs and boot sectors etc. so I
don't want to try pot luck at moving stuff about. Can anyone advise me
wether the move can be done and if so, what I need to do?

Thanks,
Tim.

 

[Ian Betts]

My laptop drive is partitioned as follows....

C: = Windows XP MCE 2005
D: = Data
E: = Vista Ultimate

Vista is my preferred OS but I still have to boot to XP, in order to
print, because HP refuse to develop drivers for my fairly expensive (£280
when I bought it) Bluetooth printer. I don't print very often so I have no
intention of buying a new printer. I like wireless printing in any case.

The thing is that now Vista is installed on the slowest sectors of the
drive while XP is on the fastest so I'd like to swap around the physical
locations of the two OS partitions.

I'm familiar with Norton Ghost and I'm quite happy making partition images
on the D: partition but I do not know what impact it will have on booting
the machine if I physically move the partitions about. I'm quite happy to
keep XP partition labeled as C: and Vista as E: if that makes things
easier but I'd be just as happy to relabel them (although I suspect that
would wreck the registry and any other areas where path data is stored).

I really don't have a clue when it comes to MBRs and boot sectors etc. so
I don't want to try pot luck at moving stuff about. Can anyone advise me
wether the move can be done and if so, what I need to do?

Thanks,
Tim.

Although you might not like a radical solution, I would format and re
install Vista on first partition.

 

[Doug]

Why don't you just virtualise XP?

 

[Tiny Tim]

Because I wouldn't know where to start, but it's an interesting idea and one
I'll look into.

I'm still not sure that will get me past my concern about physically moving
my Vista partition to the start of the drive though. Would that problem go
away if I didn't have a dual boot config? The thing is, I am where I am. I
do have dual boot and I do not want to start rebuilding the system from
scratch. I don't mind reinstalling XP MCE but I'm quite happy with my Vista
install and do not want to go back to square one with that.

So what's the best way to physically move my E:\Vista partition (or its
contents at least, including any BIOS and/or boot modifications) to the
front of the drive?

Thanks again,
Tim.

 

[Michael Jennings]

You prefer Vista to XP, but you want Vista to have better performance.
Vista ought to have slightly better performance if it's in the first
partition,
but I think you'd find that the gain would be worth less than the effort
you had spent to get it, which would include learning and experiment.

The problem with your scheme to Ghost Vista down to the XP
partition is that Vista presently manages the dual boot from there,
in the form of the bootmgr system file in the root of XP's C:\ drive.
You would need to repair the absence of that in the moved Vista.

Have you maxed out RAM? If not, gig sticks are fairly reasonable.
AMD processor prices are at desperate to move 'em levels. If your
computer is old, compare the cost of giving it little presents with
the cost of giving Vista the sort of hardware it feels entitled to.

 

[Tiny Tim]

I don't have a "problem" with performance, but if I can squeeze a little
more oomph from the system without too much effort or spending money then so
much the better. I have a 6 month old Dell XPS M1710 notebook with 2.16GHz
Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667MHz RAM and nVidia 7950GTX 512MB GFX. The HDD is my
system bottleneck, as it only spins at 5,400rpm. I have enough disk space
(120GB) and don't want to splash out for a 7,200 rpm drive when there is
nothing wrong with the drive I have.

My thinking was simply that if I can (easily) move the OS that I use 99% of
the time to the fast part of the disk then I may just as well do it as not
do it.

I was hoping I could get a small free performance boost just by moving
partitions around. Ghost was just an example of some software I have with
which I am familiar. If there is some other software that I need to make the
move then I am looking for advice on what software that might be. I don't
mind learning something new - I just don't fancy sitting here like a muppet
for hours on end reinstalling and configuring tons of software from scratch.
So if I can do what I want using partition images and maybe a small tweak to
the boot process then that's what I'm looking to do.

Moving the partition contents is the easy bit. Keeping drive/partition
letter assignments correct and making sure I can still (dual) boot OK is the
thing I need advice on.

 

[Michael Jennings]

I was picturing a slow old desktop with 1/2 gig of RAM plus indigence.

Now I am imagining that your notebook came with MCE and you used a
full Vista home premium DVD to get the dual boot. If so, there is a boot
repair on the DVD which should fix up Vista after it's moved, but MCE
moved to the upper partition wouldn't boot. You might be able to solve
that with EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 or VistaBootPRO
http://www.vistabootpro.org/ . Or you could use a boot manager.

You might want to ask about this in the bootitng newsgroup.
Here is a link to TeraByte Unlimited's instructions for posting there:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/oehelp.html
They also have a video about retaining Vista restore points:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/examples.html

 

[Tiny Tim]

Thanks. Yep, the laptop did come with MCE and a "free" Vista upgrade when
available. I'll follow up on the links you've provided.

 

[Tiny Tim]

To reply to my own thread, I tried moving the physical partitions around
using Ghost images and sure enough I got stuck with drive letter references
being all wrong and nothing working so ended up reinstalling everything from
scratch.

I tried running XP MCE in a virtual machine within Vista and while the
install and use of XP in a virtual machine was simple enough I was not able
to access my Bluetooth card so printing via Bluetooth - the precise
objective I wanted to meet - was not possible. As a result I'm back to a
dual boot config, this time with C:Vista, Data and E:XPMCE.

Thanks to everyone for your contributions.

 

[Michael Jennings]

If I respond to any similar inquiry, I will suggest more strongly that it's
better to let things be, and point them to this thread.