Fixing Vista after installing 7- dual boot

K

kasperek

Member
I made a clean install of Win 7 and dual booting with Vista worked fine. Then I tried to uninstall a program while in Vista and had a crash. Used a Vista install disk to try to repair Vista but after two tries, it said the OS was not repairable. I have read that a dual boot installation can have info on the first installed system that could affect dual booting if the earlier system is deleted.

Since Win 7 works fine ( I actually have a second Win 7 on a separte hard drive as a backup) what can I do to get Vista working again. I have given up on repair unless the utilities in BCD can actually help. I aslso hear that trying to add Vista after Win7 is installed can cause problems.

I don't want to mess up my Win 7 installes but would like to get the Vista working. If that is not easily done or subject to messing up everything, can I just delete the Vista partition without difficulty?
 
Hi Kasperek, welcome to NST.
Which partition is "system" in Disk Management.
That's where the boot files are for both W7 and Vista (unless you installed each system with the other not visible)
Do you have a dual-boot menu still, and Vista won't run (with what symptoms ?), or do you no longer have a menu to access Vista with ?
Don't worry about reinstalling Vista. Provided you don't accidentally let it overwrite W7, EasyBCD will restore your dual-boot capabilty with ease, and W7 won't be damaged.
 
In Disk Management, It is the Vista partition that is listed as system, active, Primary. The Win 7
partition that is running is boot,page file, crash dimp, logical drive. The second Win 7 on the second hard drive is just listed as primary.

I do have the boot menu with both the Win 7's and Vista listed. If I try to boot Vista in the safe mode, it runs thru many of the .sys files but stops after drive.sys and then reboots the machine.
I tried using a borrowed Vista installation disk since I only have the Dell OEM recovery. The repair said that Vista couldn't be fixed.

Win7 works great and I don't really need Vista. I was just keeping it in case I ran into any Win7 problems. If I could resurect it, OK but I just didn't want to mess up the dual boot of the two Win7's if I just formatted the Vista partition.
 
You could try system restore from the Vista DVD you borrowed, if you have a checkpoint from before Vista broke.
If you decide to get rid of Vista and just stick with W7, you can use EasyBCD 2.0 latest build / Diagnostics / Change boot drive and it will copy all of the boot files to W7 for you. If the redundant Vista shares the HDD with the new location of the boot files, that's all you need. If you copy the boot files to a different HDD, you'll also need to change the BIOS boot sequence to select the new drive first.
 
New problem

I managed to somehow get Vista to boot but I did something to the .bcd file and boot manager.
I had trouble with booting into Win7 and when I told it to boot with the last known good configuration, the main Win7 boots fine but when I run EasyBCD, it only shows the one choice for booting up. The second Win7 on the second hard drive and the Vista down't show up as choices. Is there a way to get the other two bootups into the bootu file? I don't get any choice when I start the computer.

Just to be nasty, my DVD drive just died so until a new one arrives, I can't use the install disks to do anything.
 
Add entries for the missing OSes or reset BCD store on Diagonstics Center page and than add entries for the missing OSes.
 
I too have a similar situation: I have a single HDD with 2 partitions. I want to completely get rid of Vista and have a single partition (C) C: Windows 7 (Boot, Page file, Crash dump, Primary Partition. D: Vista (System, Active, Primary Partition). Can I just do the following: use EasyBCD 2.0 latest build/ Diagnostics / Change boot drive and it will copy all of the boot files to W7 ? Then delete the D: partition?
 
Everything worked OK. I now have only 1 partition (C: Windows 7) with +/- 100 GB of unallocated space in front of the C partition. How do I get all of the unallocated space into C:?

Addendum:

I used Paragon Partition Manager to reclaim all the unallocated space and now everything is as I want it. EasyBCD saved my day!! Great program, couldn't have been easier. Thanks for all the help.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top