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How do i change the boot drive in a dual boot system

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How do i change the boot drive in a dual boot system

Postby ducky124 » Sun Mar 04, 2007 2:24 am

I currently have XP installed on my D drive and Vista installed on C. Since i already had XP installed the Vista install selected my D drive for the bootloader. How can I switch it to C and still maintain the dual boot?
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Postby kd1966 » Sun Mar 04, 2007 3:53 am

Hello and welcome to PROnetworks! The short story here is that you should NOT do what you are wanting to do, as this will probably make your dual boot not boot properly.

Quick class on drive lettering: When installing OS's, especially Windows OS's, they tend to take the C drive for themselves. THIS IN NO WAY ALTERS THE PHYSICAL LOCATION OF YOUR OTHER OS's or data from those other OS's. Generally, IN MOST CASES, the very first OS installed on a system is the "SYSTEM DRIVE", which will contain all the boot files for that OS; what Vista does in a dual boot scenario with a previous (Read = Older) version of Windows is continue the trend of allowing that drive to continue as the SYSTEM drive, so all the Vista boot files will go onto this drive, which also has the previous OS boot files (XP in your case I presume). DO NOT MESS WITH THIS SYSTEM; it works. If you have issues with the drive lettering - get over it and use the VOLUME NAME to better identify your HDD partitions. I hope this helps
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Postby ducky124 » Sun Mar 04, 2007 11:53 am

the reason I am looking to change it is so I can make a recovery image of my drive which will include all the boot info.

When I eventually decide to eliminate my XP installation somewhere down the road and format that drive. How will I then be able to boot Vista?

BTW..thanks for your quick reply to my previous post.
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Postby kd1966 » Sun Mar 04, 2007 1:41 pm

You could copy the boot info from XP (The current system drive) to the root of your Vista drive......

Files and folders are:
\boot (Folder and files)
bootmgr (file)
bootsect.bak (file)

EDIT: Also if that doesn't allow Vista to boot you can simply pop in the Vista DVD and use the "Repair my Computer" option
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