Asking for help w/EasyBCD

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dbk723

Member
My current system has 2 1TB hard drives - I have an old drive with my Windows XP install on it, and a second drive that has a 700 GB partition for data and backups, with the rest used for a Windows 7 partition. I'm using the Vista/7 bootloader and defaulting to Windows 7.

What I'd like to do is remove the XP partition, format it, move the data/backup files there, and use the entire second drive as a single Windows 7 partition without a boot loader. I have EasyBCD 2.0 build 105 installed.

Do I just need to delete Windows XP in the "Edit Boot Menu" section and check the "Skip the boot menu" box, then move things around with the Windows Disk Management and Explorer tools (after a restart, of course.)
 
dbk723 said:
Do I just need to delete Windows XP in the "Edit Boot Menu" section and check the "Skip the boot menu" box, then move things around with the Windows Disk Management and Explorer tools (after a restart, of course.)
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It depends on what partition is labeled as "system" in Disk Management. If that's XP's partition or even a partition on the same HDD as XP, you'll want to use EasyBCD's "Change Boot Drive" feature first, and use it to move all the boot files to your W7 partition, so you can boot from W7's HDD instead of XP's. Once you've done that, then it will be safe to put W7 first in the boot sequence of the BIOS, format the XP HDD, and do whatever you want with it.
 
I will make sure that I reset the boot drive first. At the moment, I'm booting from the C: drive which is a 250 GB partition with Win7 installed on it. The rest of the drive is the E: data partition. But the E: logical partition has the BOOT directory, bootmgr, and bootsect.bak on it. I assume that EasyBCD will automatically relocate those?
 
Thanks for your help. I tried moving the boot files, but it seems that I need to reset the active partition on that drive first. This is a screen capture of my configuration in the Windows Disk Management utility. Apparently I need to switch the active and logical partitions around in the settings for this drive with a program like Acronis Disk Director. So I assume I should reset the partitions and restart before reconfiguring the boot process with EasyBCE?
 

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You need to use a tool like Partition Wizard (Partition Wizard Home Edition - Reviews and free Partition Wizard Home Edition downloads at Download.com) to convert the logical partition to primary. Then you need to use EasyBCD's "Change Boot Drive" feature to set the W7 partition as the boot partition. Only then can you set the W7 disk as the boot device in the BIOS and format the XP partition.

Addendum:

EasyBCD will automatically set the W7 partition as active when you use "Change Boot Drive" after you've converted it to primary.
 
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