Partitioning Help!

Hxc

Hxc

Soldato
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Hey all, need some help with my partitoning situation.

Here is the story: I originally had XP but wanted to dual boot with Vista, so I did.

Now I want to get rid of XP.

However, the XP partiton remains the primary partiton, and if I format it, I can nolonger boot into windows and the MBR has to be recovered, but doing this brings back my old partiton as primary, so I need to ask...

How can I change the primary partiton?
 
I have been trying Acronis yes, but there seems to be no way to change a primary partiton to a logical one and vice versa
 
Hxc said:
I have been trying Acronis yes, but there seems to be no way to change a primary partiton to a logical one and vice versa
Think you'll need to re-install Vista because its boot info is on the XP partition. Unless theres another way of copying/moving this info before you format the XP partition.
 
gah damnit. Didn't want it to go down to that. Oh well.

If the boot info is on the XP drive, why do I get the Vista Boot menu instead of the XP one, out of intrest?
 
Last edited:
Hxc said:
If the boot info is on the XP drive, why do I get the Vista Boot menu instead of the XP one, out of intrest?

Because the Vista Boot menu overwrote the XP menu. As has been said, you will have to reinstall Vista. Partition Magic can change Primary partitions, but of course it won't alter the MBR.
 
Boot to Vista.
Delete Windows XP from your primary partition.
Go to Administrative tools and Disk management and Merge Partitions. If Vista is D: and XP is C: this should work.
It would have worked better if you used Vista as your Partition manager at install because you can have up to 3 Primary partitions on one Hard disk before you have to think about logical drive translation with Vista. The Merging process works this way but I haven't tried it the other with Vista so backup your system with TrueImage or Ghost before you try.
 
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