Dual Boot Vista Home/Ultimate

B

bobbyk45211

New Member
I have two versions of Vista installed on one hard drive with two partitions. C: has Vista Home Premium and D: has Vista Ultimate. I did this so I could try out Ultimate before getting rid of Home Premium, but now I want to keep my D: with Ultimate and delete C: with Home Premium. Problem is, the C: has the boot folder and boot information on it. Is there any way to move the boot folder to the D: AND be able to have my computer be redirected to boot from the moved boot files so I can completely remove the C: and then be able to expand my D: to recover the space that the C: was using? I hope this isn't too confusing for anyone trying to help me out... I have been searching all day for a way to do this but all I can find is dual boot vista/xp issues/solutions. PLEASE HELP! Thanks so much in advance to whoever can help me out!!!

Quick recap..
C:\ = Vista Home Premium
D:\ = Vista Ultimate
Wanting to move boot info/files from C:\ to D:\ so I can delete C:\ partition and then extend the hard drive space that C:\ was using onto D:\. Computer now uses C:\boot to decide which OS to boot from, but I want it to use D:\boot (if I can copy/create it here) instead. Can this be done somehow?!
 
Hi Bobby, welcome to NST.
I assume you have a Vista DVD if you're installing different versions all over the place, so you shouldn't have any problem doing what you want.
If you delete the C: partition, you'll lose the boot files and the dual boot as you suspected.
However, all you need to do is boot from the Vista DVD, select "repair my computer" then "repair startup" and it will recreate the boot environment on the D: partition automatically.
You'll need to do this 2 or three times probably until the D: drive boots without needing any further repair ( the repair process is a bit primitive and only seems capable of fixing one thing at a time)
It's all described in the wiki.
 
In disk mangement within Vista Ultimate, make the D: drive the active partition. Delete the C: partition and extend D: with the unallocated space. Open EasyBCD. It should tell you it couldn't find a valid BCD store and ask you if you want to fix it. If not go to diagnostics and restore BCD settings. If you reboot and find that didnt do the trick, boot from a Vista disc (version doesn't matter)/recovery disc from this site and do a startup repair on your Vista Ultimate installation if it doesn't automatically prompt you of the problem and fix it for you.
 
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