Move boot manager to different partition

S

Steve Samson

Member
On an HP system that originally came with XP I "upgraded" to Vista. I dual-booted for a while, but now I'm ready to commit exclusively to Vista.

However Vista got corrupted to the extent I had to reinstall from the HP upgrade disc. I did this first over the XP partition (as a desperation backup) then over the existing Vista partition. After about a week of rebuilding and reconnecting things, Vista works OK for me.

However, the original HP Recovery Partition (for XP), which originally was Drive V, has now appropriated drive letter D which was my partition for data files. Neither Disk Management nor Paragon will assign a different drive letter, because it turns out that EasyBCD put the boot manager on that drive.

I haven't found any way to move that function to a different partition or to rename the partition. If I hide that partition and make my prime Vista partition active, the system will not boot.

What I'd really like to do is to move the boot manager to my standby Vista partition and delete the HP Recovery Partition.

Any ideas?
 
Hi Steve, welcome to the forum.
EasyBCD didn't put your boot info where it is. It's a GUI for the Vista BCD editor and just edited your boot information where it found it.
The culprit was the reinstallation work you did. Windows will install itself to C if it can (it doesn't see another windows system already there) and then label any other partitions consecutively.
Normally the other partitions can be relabelled, except as you've found if they're system or boot partitions.
You should be able to delete the boot information from your recovery partition, set your Vista partition as active, then repair the Vista bootloader by booting the Vista DVD and selecting "repair".
Once Vista is booting from C, you should be able to rename D back to V as you previously had it.
In fact, you will probably not even need to delete the boot stuff on D, as long as you repair the Boot with C active.
 
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Success!

Terry,

Thanks for setting me on the right track. In fact, the suggested fix did not work until I did the following:
1. Deleted BOOTMGR from the recovery partition and hid that partition
2. moved the C: (prime Vista) partition to HD 0
3. Went through several iterations of the repair procedure. The first time, the prime Vista partition was not detected because it was on HD 1.
The next time, repair determined that something was wrong and offered to repair it without detecting any Vista partitions. Finally, it detected the two Vista partitions and got me back to a working system.

The indispensable tool for all of this was a bootable CD of Paragon Partition Manager. (My, how I miss Partition Magic!)

Once again, great thanks.

p.s. Would you happen to know an easy hack to activate hibernation? The Vista power management options offer no direct way to do this and I am weary of full shutdowns and restarts.
 
Glad you've got things back the way you want them. I too have a bootable Paragon Floppy from my WinME days, which was my first tool in setting up this dual-boot.
Regarding Hibernate, I quote from Vista help

In earlier versions of Windows, standby saves your work to memory and puts your mobile PC into a power-saving state. Hibernate also puts your mobile PC into a power-saving state but saves your work to your hard disk so that you can safely turn off your mobile PC. This version of Windows combines standby and hibernate into a single power-saving state called sleep.
Note
I personally don't use it, never have. I just have a very aggressive set of power saving timings and no screen saver.
 
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