Help! Moving from xp/vista to just vista

fross · 26 Aug 2009 at 11:30

Hi all,

A year or so ago, I was still running XP, and I decided to install Vista onto my new harddrive and dual-boot it with XP, to see if I liked it. Well, I do like it, and now want to re-use the drive that was holding XP, to hold media files.

The problem is, the system boots from the XP drive (I checked in the BIOS), it then presumably runs a boot loader which asks me to choose between XP and Vista - when I choose Vista, my second harddrive becomes "C:" and everything is normal. My XP drive is available under Vista, as "D:". However, I can't format it or anything - presumably because Vista knows it has the boot stuff on it!

I tried changing the BIOS to boot off the Vista drive directly, but it says there is no "BOOTMGR" on it. Does anyone know how I can fix the Vista drive to be bootable, so I can select it in the BIOS, and then I can reformat my XP drive for another use?

Thanks in advance!

fross · 26 Aug 2009 at 12:05

Oh and before anyone asks, I don't know where my Vista DVD is offhand, so if anyone has a solution that doesn't involve booting off that, that would be great

fross · 26 Aug 2009 at 13:44

Just a bump, and to state I found my Vista DVD and can boot off it! Got to the command prompt within system repair, but bootrec doesn't seem to have a default option for this... anyone know how to use it to achieve what I wrote above?

Thanks

fross · 26 Aug 2009 at 14:19

Okay, think I fixed this.

System repair was doing little on its own, so I changed the boot order of my drives, effectively making my Vista drive c: (and not being able to boot). Then I had to run startup recovery *twice*, as apparently it only does one repair at a time. Now I can boot directly from my Vista drive, mission accomplished!

Except now it's asking me to put my activation key in, and some of my user account settings have changed (eg background has disappeared), so it may be time to upgrade to Windows 7!