Repair bootloader in W7 / Vista setup

Smal

Member
Need to rearrange my HDDs . I currently have Vista X86 on two disks in a Raid 0 array and a freshely installed W7 x64 on an Intel X25-M SSD. All on a Dell XPS720 with a nVidia 680i chipset. The Intel Toolbox for running TRIM will not work as the w7 bootloader is in my Raid array. I will need to move my SSD to SATA port 0 and make a fresh install of W7. Then reconnect the Vista drives to port 1 and 2 (currently on 0 and 1). The Vista drives contain one partition with the Dell diagnostics tool (shows itself as an EISA configuration without drive letter), one partition with Vista and one recovery partion.

After having reconnected the Vista drives, I will have no boot record for them on my active W7 partion on the SSD. Should it work just to run a startup repair from my Vista (OEM) DVD? Note that Vista is running SP2 and the DVD contains original Vista.

Have never done anything similar so I would need all advice I can get on this.
 
As my bootloader is on the first Raid disk with Vista right now, I guess I would have to create records for both W7 and Vista on the SSD?
Would that not mean I would have two active partitions and that I could start with either depending on what disk I put first in the BIOS (or choose with F8)?
Are there any potential problems with having two active partitions?
If it is, can you remove one of them?
 
If you installed W7 with Vista RAID disconnected, you've already got a BCD with each OS. You just need to add an entry for the other in whichever one you put first in the BIOS.
You can only have one "active" partition per HDD.
The active flag just tells the MBR IPL which partition to search for the boot manager on whichever disk is top in the BIOS boot sequence. It doesn't matter how many other active partitions exist on other devices.
 
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