How to safely rid my Drive 0 of Win XP64 in favor of Win 7

neoslick

Active Member
I installed Windows 7 on a PC that was running XP Pro 64-bit such that the first partition is the old XP and the 2nd is the newer Windows 7. I later used EasyBCD to make W7 the preferred boot OS. According to this link:

Multibooters, Vista Dual and Multibooting - A Guide to the Multiboot Process

I believe that the bootmgr and BCD are on the first XP partition. I'm not sure what magic EasyBCD uses so... :scared: I'd like to get rid of XP 64 and wonder how the safest way to do this might be.

Thanks for any advice...!
 

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Well I'd have thought this was an easy question for the experts here. I think what I am going to do, which may greatly simplify things, is to take an image backup of the W7 partition and image-it back (restore) it to an SSD. Then I will just pull the dual-boot drive and deal with the SSD alone.

Then it should be a relatively simple matter to use e.g. a Repair disc to re-create boot for the SSD? I found some info in (gulp) the documentation for EasyBCD that suggests fixing missing boot blocks is readily do-able.
 
W7 will have installed its bootmgr in the XP partition ( because it was "active").
You can copy it to W7
Changing the Boot Partition
and once you are booting W7 and have verified that it is flagged "active", "boot" and "system" in Disk Management, you can format XP away.
Windows won't let you remove it while it holds the boot files.
 
Thank you Terry60--I looked and looked and didn't find that page you linked-to.

My W7 partition already reads as "System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition"--yikes I just went thru my old notes and it seems I used EasyBCD 2.0 b76 ALMOST FIVE YEARS AGO NOW to change the boot partition from XP.

Good grief it looks like my XP part is already good-to-GO! Thanks again and sorry for the bandwidth...! :S:grinning:
 
No problem.
I just checked and that link definitely works, so you must have encountered a temporary wiki glitch.
 
I restored the image of the W7 partition, the one that had been set by EasyBCD using the "Change boot drive" under Backup/Repair, to my SSD and it booted perfectly. But then I found that the SSD was not "aligned" properly and after I re-aligned it with the MiniTool Partition Wizard it would no longer boot! Windows said it was missing boot blocks. I tried copying again the boot blocks using the original spinning hdd to the newly aligned W7 SSD, but it did not work--Windows still complained of missing boot blocks.

So I just booted the PC with a Repair disk and repaired the SSD with it and it worked, although of course my EasyBCD setup was gone. I just re-asserted my desired settings and all's good now.

Dunno why EasyBCD failed to copy-over and fix the SSD but no matter--it was easy enough to fix. As Terry60 sez "Don't Panic". :brows:
 
The BCD doesn't contain any disk letters. It addresses systems with a UID which is composed of the disk signature and the partition offset.
Because the UID is unintelligible to humans, EasyBCD translates the partition into a letter as mapped by the OS you're running it on.
Realign a partition, and you break the BCD because the OS is no longer located where the BCD tries looking for it.
The BCD needs repairing, either by "startup repair" from the installation DVD, or "reset BCD" in EasyBCD
 
The BCD doesn't contain any disk letters. It addresses systems with a UID which is composed of the disk signature and the partition offset.
Because the UID is unintelligible to humans, EasyBCD translates the partition into a letter as mapped by the OS you're running it on.
Realign a partition, and you break the BCD because the OS is no longer located where the BCD tries looking for it.
The BCD needs repairing, either by "startup repair" from the installation DVD, or "reset BCD" in EasyBCD
Thanks Terry60 for the explanation. I had tried only "Change boot drive" i.e. thinking it'd copy from the still-good spinner to the won't-boot SSD and that didn't work & then I did the easiest next thing (the repair disk).

I don't understand this stuff well enough in the first place, much less touching it only every 5 years or so! :?? Thanks for working here and staying on top of this simple-but-sophisticated tool.
 
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