Test problems prior to new controller

[frustrated999]

I have two separate questions here regarding adding a new controller:

1) Looking at installing a separate SATAII controller in a couple of boxes here which currently only have SATA1 controller on board. For a test I copied the two primary partitions from my main hard drive on one of these machines to a spare SATA2 hard drive I have connected to the new controller. I disconnected the main hard drive so that there is currently only one hard drive in the machine connected to the new controller.

First primary partition is Win7 which boots fine. Second primary is WinXP which does not boot. The boot process is trying to open partition(1) in a boot.ini file. As far as I can determine the partition(1) parameter should be in fact partition(2) in this case or am I wrong? I tried finding this entry in a boot file but I can not find it. I am using the current build of EasyBCD to create the boot entry for XP automatically. Any idea what is going on here?

2) Another computer here which I am thinking of adding a SATA2 controller has SATA1 right now. This computer is using Hide 'N Seek and has Windows XP in the first primary partition followed by Windows7 in a second primary partition. I want to remove XP all together so that Win7 is the only o/s on the drive. Then I want to move the hard drive to a SATA2 controller.
I was thinking of telling Hide N Seek to start over again so that it is no longer in used.

While the hard drive is still connected to the current controller and after deleting XP Is there any way of moving Win7 partition to the beginning of the hard drive and still have it boot properly? Is using the Win7 boot DVD and Repair option the best way to fix the boot problem after the partition is moved?

 

[Terry60]

The partition number in the ARC path (in boot.ini) is derived from the position in the partition table in the MBR, not from the position on the HDD.

You can run HnS again and tell it to remove itself. (It loses its raison-d'etre if you scrap XP).
Then if XP is "system", you can use EasyBCD > BCD Backup/repair > Change boot drive to copy all the boot files to W7.
Then reboot into W7 and with XP no longer "system", you can format the space and reuse it.
You can't move W7 to the front of the HDD with anything available in Windows.
You'll need a W7-compatible 3rd-party partition manager, and depending on how compatible it is, you might need to repair the boot process afterwards.

 

[frustrated999]

I got the computer mentioned in question 1 running late last night. I recopied the XP partition from the main hard drive over to the test hard drive I was using then removed the main hard drive and the test drive containing Windows7 and XP both booted. Only thing I can think of is that XP I had been using did not have a driver for the separate controller card.

Thanks Terry for the replies concerning question 2. Those steps will help.