Deleting XP from a dual boot with Vista

iraji

Member
I have a two hard drive system. XP was installed on drive D and Vista was installed on drive C. I decided to delete XP and have one OS system with Vista only. I used easyBCD to delete the XP entry and all worked fine when I rebooted, Vista came up fine.
My problem is that when I remove the extra drive, which is drive D, Vista will not boot. It tells me the boot sector is corrupted. But when I replace drive D, Vista boots fine. XP has been removed from drive D but there are still some folders there in the root such as Boot, RCYCLER, System Volume Information, Temp.
Thanks for helping


Addendum:


Addendum
I must say my original PC's OS was XP on drive C. I installed Vista on drive D because I wasn't sure if I would like it as well as XP. Later I switched the drive letters!! As a result, current drive D has the system on it so it can't be removed or Vista won't boot. Is there a way to make current drive C the system so Vista can boot from C and drive D can be removed? I really need some help here.
Thanks
 
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It has nothing to do with the letters.
When you installed Vista, it saw the existing XP which, being the only OS, had the "system" designation in the disk management flags (where the Windows boot files are).
Vista installed itself into the partition you told it to, but put its boot files (the \boot folder and the bootmgr file) with XP's in the "system" partition. That's normal.
Multiple Windows OSs always boot from the same partition, unless you use a non-Windows 3rd Party boot manager.
Follow Jus's instructions, and the "startup repair" (3 times) will recreate the Vista boot files on the Vista partition.
 
Thank you both for responding. I am in process of trying to do what you have said. As a side comment it is interesting to note that Microsoft says to install Vista after XP but it seems its better to install Vista first then XP so this type of promlems don't occur! Or am I wrong?
I will report back as soon as Vista repair is complete.

Addendum:

I tried it three time and in the final time it said it can't find any start up problems but it still is not booting. After the bios loads, there's a curser on the screen that just blinks but windows is not loading. any ideas?
Thanks
 
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It is recommended in a multi-boot configuration that oldest be installed first followed by newest. This is because XP doesn't recognize Vista, but since Vista is newer it recognizes an existing XP install and sets a dual-boot up automatically for you. Installing in the opposite order would permit you to only boot XP until you repaired the Vista bootloader, which than would only boot Vista until you add an entry that'll boot XP.

You may need to check and make sure the partition Vista is on is active. Go to the command prompt in the recovery options menu:

diskpart
select disk 0
list part
select part x
active
exit

Replace x with the right number for Vista's partition as reported by list part. You may also try running chkdsk and than trying startup repair again. In case a system file was/is stored under a bad block on the disk:

chkdsk c: /r

You can check the system files for corruption with the system file checker:

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows\

Bootsect might be able to help you. If you've got EasyBCD on the Vista system:

cd /d "c:\program files\neosmart technologies\easybcd\bin"
bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force

Lastly you may try recreating the bcd store manually with the steps in the link I provided. Otherwise you may need to re-install Vista.
 
Good news, the problem was fixed as soon as Vista drive was the active drive. Evidently the repair was successful but since the drive was not the active drive, it wasn't working. So thank you for all your help, I certainly learned a lot.
 
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