How to make system boot drive (removing dualboot setup)

[Guest]

Scenario:
Didn't know if Vista would work well. So simply added another drive to my
WinXp machine. Installed Vista on this drive so I could dual boot either to
WinXP or Vista.

Works fine, can boot to XP or Vista.

Now, I have decided that Vista supports the applications I like and has the
drivers for the hardware I have on the machine.

I want to remove the WinXP drive and boot from the Vista drive.

-
Drive Details:

From the Windows Disk Management utility, drives read as follows:
Disk 0 Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
Disk 1 Healthy (Boot, Page File, Active, Primary Partition)
Disk 2 Healthy (Primary Partition)

-
Disk 0 is the original boot disk with with WinXP system on it
Disk 1 is the Vista system
Disk 2 is my raid setup for storing WinMedia stuff

Question: Is there a way, without a full reinstall of Vista, to remove Disk
0 and make the Disk 1 a reckognized bootable drive for Vista (aka the system
drive)? If so, any recommendations would be appreciated.

- Rich

 

[BobS]

Rich,

Had a similar setup but I've been doing a lot of testing so my hardware
configuration and multi-boot scenarios changed often in the past several
weeks. But as I recall, what I did (my discs are in carriers and can be
removed) is I just pulled the WinXP drive then rebooted. Make sure the BIOS
is set to boot from the DVD and that Vista drive is seen by the BIOS.

Boot to the Vista DVD and select the repair option and it will write the new
boot record to your Vista drive. Reboot, set your BIOS so it selects the
Vista drive and let 'er rip.

Bob S.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Bob,

Makes sense, gave it a try. Amazed at the options you get when you choose
repair.

Didn't work though. /sigh

At the drive to repair selection it showed the vista drive, but a zero size
partition.
Attempted the repair anyway, it says corrupt, "windows\system32\winload.exe"

Put the WinXp drive back in, booted, and wrote this replay, from Vista on
the drive that showed zero size... go figure.

 

[BobS]

Rich,

That is odd - Vista saying zero size but.... Do you know if you have ever
partitioned and formatted that drive in the past? I have a Samsung drive
that came partitioned with it's own overlay and I could not load WinXP or
Vista to it until I partitioned it (wiping out the factory overlay) with a
Win9x boot disc. Even though I used Vista and WinXP tools to partition and
format - those did not work.

Not saying this is the same as you're experiencing but may be indicative of
"factory overlays" having a problem with some OS's. I would download the
diags from the manufacturer and look at the documentation to see what they
used to partition the drive - if anything. Use the non-destructive part of
the diags so you don't ruin your Vista install.

If you find they used some kind of overlay, you may want to consider wiping
that drive and starting over. You can get the boot files and FDISK (for >
than 67GB drives) at www.bootdisc.com and use FDISK at the DOS level to
partition the drive. Then boot from the DVD and format the drive using
Vista and then do the dual load scenario to get a clean install of Vista.
Now this may be way off base for your situation but a zero size partition
tells me Vista doesn't know anything about that drive.

Hopefully somebody else has a better idea for you to try,

Bob S.

 

[Guest]

I bought the drive in January of this year to install Vista on it.

I added the drive to the computer (cable select mode), booted from the Vista
Ultimate DvD and installed the OS on that drive after Vista setup formatted
the drive. (WDC 1200JB-75CRAO ATA drive) The drive was entirely formatted
and the partition made from the entire drive size.

Haven't seen Low level formatting utilities come with a drive in years (aka
the bootable disk utility that used to come with drives). I understand what
you mean by the overlay, Compaq sets aside it's 8 or 10mb partition for it's
own utilities et.

I gave up last night. Pulled out the Vista DvD and reinstalled Vista on top
of drive. It replaced the Windows directory to windows.old and installed
itself into a fresh windows directory.

Note for any others doing this, it wipes out the /users and subfolders
directories entirely. Back up your stuff if you need your favorites or user
files. Applications will also need to be reinstalled afterwards.

Will note that the file and transfer settings app within Vista isn't the
best friend to users. It wanted another computer to connect to, not another
drive within the machine. Sad really, helps OEMs but not home system builders
who often do upgrades from old drives to new...