Dual Boot issue, MBR/UEFI on wrong partition

C

CarlBar

Member
Found this tool listed in a few places and hoping it can help but i've no real idea how to use it for the purpose i want and frankly everywhere else i've asked on the web has given me zero answers. I could theoretically do a complete re-install if i can find the safe place i put my win 8.1 install disk, (yes i really put it so safe i can't find it, but that was 5 years ao so erm yeah), but it would mean reinstalling a ton of stuff despite having most stuff on other drives.

Anyway my issue is that when i upgraded to my new system i wanted to keep my old Vista install. Bad move in hindsight but i was rightfully worried about some of my older games :frowning:. Anyway i asked a local computer shop to set it up as a vista win8.1 dual boot using an image of my old vista install. Due to neither them nor me later being able to find MB drivers vista basically got abandoned and i recently decided to disable it completely in MSconfig. I've since yanked the bits off the partition and am ready to do a deletion so i can merge the space with my Win 8.1 partition. I've now discovered however the win Vista partition is the system disk which means it has the boot info on it. I need to fix this and i have no clue how.

I think my MB might be UEFI, (ASrock Z97 Extreme 4), though not 100% sure. I could do with a tutorial on exactly how to fix this. Ideally with the option to revert if anything goes wrong, (i can go back and merge the disks after i've confirmed everything is booting.

Image of my disks, pardon the data on the data drive,s quite a bit of duplication there for variou reasons ATM.

Boot stuff.png

C is my win 8.1, D is the vista i want to remove so i can merge the space into one partition.
 
Okay fixed it. Decided to download the tool and put it on my flash drive for later use, and thats when i realised there are two tools, one for a non-bootable PC, one for use from desktop. I feel so dumb.

Though i do have another issue. I can;t extend my C volume to include the space made available by clearing D. I suspect it's because C is after the empty space instead of before it. Note to self for future use. Dual boots are a pain.
 
Follow the instructions in
Changing the Boot Partition
which will copy all the boot files into C from D.
It won't alter D but it will flip the active bit in the MBR partition table from D to C, so that when you reboot, you will be rebooting from the new copy of the boot files not the old.
You will then see that C is "active" "system" and "boot", and you will be free to reuse the D partition space.
You won't be able to expand C "backwards" into D directly.
You'll need to use a bootable partition manager to copy C into a merged partition.
If I were you I'd just format D and reuse it as a data partition and leave C alone; much less chance of problems.

Disk Management flags have the following meanings

"boot" = "this is the system you're running"
"system" = "this is where I found the boot files for the currently running system"
"active" (on the first HDD in the BIOS boot sequence) = "this is where I started the search for the boot files"
"active" (on subsequent HDDs in the BIOS boot sequence) ="this is where I will look if I don't find something in the MBR on the first HDD"
 
Hey thanks for the reply. I figured it out before you posted.

My issue was i didn't realise there were two seperate tools and all the stuff i'd read before was about the recovery essentials tool so the tutorial in that link. (which i'd already found but thnx), had me wondering how to get to the point where it starts as the UI looked completely different. As soon as i realised my mistake it was a piece of cake.

Also yeah i'm considering that. TBH i mostly want the space back so the SSD has more empty cells to do wear leveling with as there wasn't a lot of empty space before i started.
 
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