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[Antigen Profile]

I recently installed Windows 7 on a new HD (C) and have Vista located on a separate HD (D). My problem is that the bootmgr being used is on my D drive that contains Vista and I would like it to be on the C drive that contains Win7. As of now, under disk management, I see the drive with Vista indicated as "Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) and my C drive with Win7 saying "Healthy (boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition). I've tried using the original Win7 DVD and the repair disk but could not get it to work. I am concerned that if the drive containing Vista fails, then Win7 will not operate. For example, if I now take out the drive containing Vista (D) and try to load Win7, it will not boot. I've also tried changing the order of the drives in the BIOS so that the C drive with Win7 boots first, but again it will not boot. It only boots when the D drive with Vista is first. I recently purchasing DualBootPro thinking I could easily move the bootmgr to my C drive but I see no option for this. I know enough about this stuff to be considered dangerous so any help is appreciated. BTW...this is my first post on any forum believe it or not.
Antigen

[Grav!ty Profile]

Hi Antigen and welcome to PROnetworks

I think you will need to copy the file bootmgr and the folder Boot from the root of Vista and paste it to your Windows 7 drive. Then set your Windows 7 drive as the first boot HDD, boot to your Windows 7 DVD and run a Startup repair by selecting Repair your computer at the Install Now setup screen and then select Startup repair from the menu that appears. Folder Options need to be set to show hidden files and folders and not to hide protected operating system files before you will see those items.

This will probably end up giving you the Vista moving green bar at startup of Windows 7 instead of the Win 7 four light points, and you can avoid that by unplugging your Vista drive before running the Windows 7 Startup repair and DO NOT copy the file and folder above from Vista. You will then need to add a new entry to the Windows 7 using DualBootPRO (after replugging your Vista drive but keeping your Win 7 drive as the first boot HDD). If that's an issue for you do to and you're happy to live with the green moving bar at startup then skip this step and go with the first way of getting this done.

[Antigen Profile]

Okay thank you and I've now resolved the issue. What I did was unplug the drive that had Vista and booted up with the original Win7 install DVD. I was initially confused because no system was listed to repair but I clicked through and selected repair anyways. When I restarted I was happy to see that Win7 booted without the need of the old drive. I then hooked up my old drive and made sure the drive with Win7 was first set to boot first. Now I'm happy to say that under disk management, my C drive with Win7 indicated "system, boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition". My original mistake was when I installed Win7 on my new drive and then hooked up the old drive containing Vista, I did not think to change the boot order to the drive with Win7. As such, Win7 began using the bootmanager on the old drive containing Vista.
Antigen

[Grav!ty Profile]

Well done Antigen and thanks for letting us know your solution

[dhodgson Profile]

(transferring in from other thread)

I had a similar problem in that my 4-partition Win 7 system (C:,D:,E: F, with C:\ upgraded to Win 7 from Vista) had BOOTMGR and its accompanying /boot directory, etc. located on E:\, which for reasons unknown was the only partition with the System bit set. Bootmgr would boot off E:\ before handing the rest of the boot to C:\, which worked fine in practice but was a suboptimal for boot-partition image restoration purposes.

Anyway, as partitions C-F are all running on a couple of internal RAID-0 drive pairs (C & E spanning two drives, D & F spanning another two) removing two of the drives and forcing the startup back to C:\ via Startup Repair wasn't an option. Instead, I tried using Partition Commander 10.1 to delete E:\ and possibly undelete later after having tried the Startup Repair trick. Startup Repair worked Too well, unfortunately - it restored the partition table and voila, I was right back to where I was before! Other experiments always seemed to end up with BOOTMGR being restored (or installed) on E:\, the "System" partition no matter what I tried.

To make a long story short... between this issue and Win 7's "TrustedInstaller" deletion issues (which prevented me from forcibly removing the old Vista archives that Win 7's Upgrade installer had also put on E:\) I ended up booting off the Win 7 upgrade CD in order to delete ALL the partitions, recreate them from scratch and reinstall. Problem Solved, the hard way - but at least it let me! I was particularly concerned that the Upgrade copy of Win 7 would bail out because it couldn't find any proof of an old OS in order to proceed. Phew.

-djh

[SacreCoeur Profile]

I've been having that Antigen was having to begin with.

I had Vista on my HD C: first and I ran the Windows 7 DVD from that HD due to the error message that the DVD always gave me, this is why the boot loader was originally installed on my C: drive instead of the new windows 7 drive. I can't boot the windows 7 drive if the vista drive isn't connected. I tried to run startup repair but my problem is that for some reason when i choose to boot from the Windows 7 DVD it always gives me the "BOOTMGR is missing. Press ALT+CTRL+DEL to restart" message, therefore I cannot run the Startup Repair.