Convert Dual Boot To Single Boot, 2 HDds
Aug 27, 2009
I setup an XP/Windows 7 dual boot on two drives. Currently C: Windows 7, D:XP
Love Windows 7 and now I'm ready to convert to single boot Windows 7.
I'm not real savy re. bcdedit so will need very detailed instructions
I did find the command line in Windows 7 by going through accessories but I'm scared to go further without help.
Eventually I want to clean up the D:xp and use it for storage etc.
I'm guessing this procedure may have already be written up but I can't seem to find it.
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Dec 28, 2012
I'm new around here so, if you've seen this before, please bear with me.I have a computer with 3 hard disks in it as follows.Patriot Pyro 120 GB on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (installed first).WD Velociraptor 450 GB on Windows 8 Pro x64 (installed second).Samsung something 2 TB storage (forget about this one).The 2 operating systems are completely independent and functioning properly; obviously, the SSD (Pyro) is set to boot first in the bios and, at start-up, there's no boot manager asking me which OS I intend to use. Basically, every time I want to logon on my Velociraptor with Windows 8 I have to press F8 at start-up and choose from the given list of bootable HDDs.Now, I've tried EasyBCD without luck and I've read somewhere that, apparently, the Windows 7 boot manager can't boot a Windows 8 partition so, my question is, is there a way to add my Windows 8 Velociraptor to the boot manager of the first booting HDD, i.e the SSD with Windows 7?
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Dec 15, 2009
I've a Dual Boot with Xp/Win 7 on my office Desktop workstation. Window7 is the beta version of the Win 7. And like all other companies.... my company also want it's wallpaper and screen-saver on each machine ..... But i somehow manage to install Window 7 on my office Desktop.
Now i want to remove Window 7 partition and restore my Xp MBR and that too without using Windows Xp Bootable CD ( as CDs are not allowed in my company )...
How can i restore my Xp MBR while accessing my Xp Partition as i already have deleted my Windows 7 partition .
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Nov 3, 2009
I've done some searching for this and found some similar issues but nothing fits exactly what I'm trying to do. I have been running Vista Ult. 64 bit for a little over a year and have loved it. It solved all the problems I had with XP Pro 32 bit on my hardware. I bought 7 Pro 64 bit through www.theultimatesteal.com since I'm taking some night classes. I forgot I couldn't upgrade from Ult.
to Pro so I had to do a clean install, which I did, on a separate drive. I have five drives in my system, C, D, and E are all 1TB while F and G are 1.5TB. C is where Vista is installed and G is where 7 is located. I'll be going back and forth between the OS's until I get everything the way I want it.
At that point I want to remove Vista and have 7 be the only OS. But I do not want to migrate the install onto the 1TB C: drive, I want to keep it on the 1.5TB drive but have it recognized as the C: drive. The install was done from within Vista from the download since my physical media has not yet arrived. So even when I boot into 7, it is seen as being installed on the G: drive; it did not make itself the C: drive.
So I'll need to get rid of Vista, get 7 to see itself as being the C: drive, get rid of the boot menu, and swap the drives and cables around to put my 7 install at the head of the HDD pack. I've already done a full system backup of my Vista install with Acronis TIH 2010. How do I need to go about this? On another note; why did MS only offer home and pro through ultimate steal? They offered Vista Ultimate. I mean, it is called ULTIMATE steal, not Pro steal afterall, and it would have made the upgrade process that much easier.
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Aug 4, 2012
I want to combine my 2 desktops into one, since I never use both together and the older one is very dated by now (think Time/tiny computers old). My current machine is an Asus P5Q-E with a C2D and has one HDD on a SATA connection running windows 7 64bit. The old computer is a single core Athlon 2700+ thing with a pair of hard drives on a single IDE ribbon.What I want to do is put the hard drives from the old machine into the newer and be able to choose between Windows XP already installed on the old master IDE hard drive and Windows 7 on the newer SATA drive (I've only kept the old computer to run XP for compatibility), all the while keeping the old slave IDE drive as a slave.
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Mar 12, 2012
I would like to remove Vista from my dual boot setup. Here is how I got to where I am now.
I had Vista installed on my PC hard drive (was C. Later, I decided to install Windows 7 HP on a new and seperate HDD. I unplugged the Vista HDD and added the new HDD and installed Windows 7 as if from scratch (I was worried that the install would mess up all my files on Vista). After the Windows 7 was up and running, I then reconnected Vista redesignated it as drive E: and after some searching on how to, I created the dual boot using my Windows 7 disk so I'm assuming the boot file in on drive C: along with Windows 7.
I now want delete the dual boot and Vista so I can use the drive as a backup drive or possibly Win8. I have found several methods to do this but none that really have my specific situation.
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Mar 16, 2011
Can I make a dual boot for XP SP3 x32 and Win7 x64 on a single pc. Both will have their own hdd(primary master probably XP and primary slave Win7 x64 or other way around)...possible?
I'll have that project with an Asus K8V SE Deluxe mobo which is 64bit capable. Haven't tried it on that yet.(Using Win7 x64 on a newer pc).
I saw an old Compaq desktop with only 1.5gb ram with Win7 x32 and it was quite zippy(yeah surprised me really! ). It even had Adobe CS3, Cyberlink video editors(Power Director/Producer, Autocad 2005 in it in addition to Avast IS ver6(no firewall/behavioral shield, Comodo firewall(D+ max settings --sandbox disabled), standard Office 2007, PDFXchange Viewer suite etc..
Owner friend just did an experiment with that old Compaq and when it was finished invited us for a couple of beers and showed what he had done.
So me thinking....I might be able to try making that project but with an x64 capable mobo. Although I have not used x64 on it(even after I ditched it) it was zippy in XP x32 ram maxed out with Norton IS 2009 --with Malwarebytes, Superantispyware Pro/ ACAD 2008 / SAS Jump Statistical software / MathCAD / forgot the rest.
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Sep 11, 2012
I have been trying for a while to install mac os x on my windows 7 pc i have followed hundreds of different tutorials and hit a wall at every one.
what is the best way to install mac os x on a single hdd? i no my pc is compatible with it i dont no where im going wrong.
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Jul 28, 2011
I'm trying to install a new hard drive and retire my current one to backup and data storage purposes.
The problem is that I've installed Windows 7 on a hard drive with 2 partitions, an old XP partition (D:) and the new W7 partition (C:). At the moment the disk management screen looks like this:
What I am trying to do is delete the D: partition, and then copy/resize the C: partition including Windows 7 installation to my new hard drive (F:)
If I ignore the new hard drive and just try to migrate to a single partition, I can never get it to boot. I tried using Partition Wizard to set the C: as a primary, active partition, copied over the bootmgr and boot directory, then used bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot to try to make Windows 7 bootable from just the C:, but it didn't work. All I got was "disk read error" whilst the PC was trying to boot off the C: (this is with all other drives disconnected...).
I could try to migrate to a single bootable partition from a 'dual boot' configuration?? I tried this video's advice and did everything as instructed but got the disk read error problem.
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Nov 11, 2012
Tried tackling this one single-handedly to begin with and failed.
I have Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installed as a dual boot, different partitions single HDD.
I want to remove the Windows 7 partition and keep the Win 2008. I do NOT want to lose anything from the Win 2008 partition. Taken from Disk Management.
Disk 3 with 5 partitions
1st - Healthy, Primary partition 73MB. (I thought this was system reserve but its not, leftover space from a previous partition change). It's currently mounted and completely empty.
2nd - Unallocated space 500mb
3rd - Windows 7 OS (Healthy - system, active, primary partition)
4th - Windows 2008 Server OS (Healthy - boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition)
5th - Unallocated space 8mb'ish
I haven't been using Windows 7 for years and want to clean this drives partitions up because it's messy and wasting space. I just need windows server 2008 as it's been used as a server for years and that's all I need it for now.
I want to safely remove the windows 7 installation and merge that partition along with the 1st and unallocated spaces back into a single partition where windows 2008 server resides.
Now I've tried tackling this myself and failed. I stupidly made the windows server 2008 partition as active which killed my boot and took me forever to repair with zero loss fortunately. Sadly it was as simple as using diskpart in a command prompt from win 2008 boot disk to make win 7 partition active again.
So, how do I do this? The boot manager must be on the win 7 partition as removing active killed it. The windows 7 boot (during startup) is long removed, system boots directly to windows 2008.
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Mar 14, 2012
I installed Ubuntu on a older Toshiba laptop. When I boot up it asks me to select either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. I want to get rid of the Ubuntu disk partition and give that 2.9 GB space to my primary hard drive. I go into compmgmt.msc but I can't execute any commands on that disk partition.
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Apr 10, 2011
Win 7 x64 Home Premium w/Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, v.1.1 (P45), works great in IDE mode. (N.B.: eSATA port is just regular SATA port w/cable as provided by Gigabyte.) Trying to install external eSATA HDD. First I enabled AHCI drivers via registry. Then I turned on AHCI in BIOS. When I save BIOS and reboot, boot hangs when DVD writer performs sniffer boot, i.e., HDDs aren't found.
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Aug 21, 2009
i have an odd 5900 RPM HDD that i need to swap out. i'm going to swap it out mainly because it's better suited for storage/backup rather than being my main HDD for usage/boot-up.
i don't want to reinstall Windows 7 (7100) and i want to copy everything from HDD "a" to HDD "b". any ideas/suggestions/comments?
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Feb 14, 2012
I am upgrading my HTPC that i put together a few years back to have a SSD as a boot drive to increase space, quiet background running and speed up booting, etc.Everything was running fine before trying to exchange the raptor for the m4. I had a big issue getting Windows installed on m4 but finally did a clean install when no harddrive was connected except the SSD to the original SATA port of the boot drive. Once I had windows installed, and i was able to boot up with only the SSD attached to the boot SATA port, I attached the 3 storage drives to their original SATA ports and got an error when booting... it paused in mid boot, then started searching for a boot disk in the DVD drive. I looked at the BIOS and the SSD is listed as 1st (port0) on hard drive boot order and hard drive is 1st boot priority. I unplugged all 3 storage drives and it booted up without an issue
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Nov 17, 2012
I've just discovered (after a panicked hour trying to work out what was going wrong) that my boot and system partitions for windows 7 are on different hard drives. The boot partition is on my 120GB SSD and the system partition is on my 320GB WD HDD.
This means that I have to have both hard drives plugged in for my system to boot. Obviously this isn't the best set up as if one of the hard drives fails then I'm screwed! Is there any way to fix this without having to re-install windows?
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Sep 12, 2011
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
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Sep 4, 2010
I have one HDD C: with Windows 7 64bit and another HDD from my previous dual boot PC with two partitions C: and E:, both winX pro.How is it possible to combine both HDDs, creating a multi boot system having as C: my Windows 7 drive?
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Jun 4, 2012
So I tried installing Windows on my new machine and did waht seemed to be the recommended thing and plugged in only my SSD into the Sata port, leaving my other drives unplugged until after the installation. Everything went fine and I was able to get Windows 7 up, drivers were installing and everything was peachy, but Then I plugged in my other drives, and when I did so with the computer running Windows immediately recognized them and I could access them, as well as do whatever I wanted. However when I restarted I got the message BOOTMGR is missing.
Now, you may be thinking that this is a simple issue of it trying to load from one of those other HDDs, just set the boot order in the BIOS blah blah. But its not. I set the boot order in the BIOS to use the SSD, I set the SSD to the top of the list within the HDDS priority order and still nothing. I then took it a step further and instead of selecting the order manually told it to boot from the SSD flat out, boot from this drive and the same error message came up. I already did the boot from Windows disc, startup repair thing - didn't work.
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Sep 23, 2012
I have just installed a new P5G41T-M LX Series motherboard and two DDR3 x 2GB replacing DDR2. During startup a message says BOOTMGR is missing, press Ctrl Alt Delete to restart, on restart the same message is repeated.
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Oct 14, 2009
I installed Windows 7 on a partitioned harddrive with vista on the other half. After the installation i have my boot menu with:Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows vista still works but when i try and load windows 7 i get a boot error message
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Oct 30, 2009
I have XP (x86) installed on one partition.
Last night I installed Windows 7 (x64) on a separate partition.
Anytime I had tried this in the past, using Vista, it always detected the Windows XP partition, and gave me a boot menu with "Earlier Version of Windows" option to boot to.
This is not so with Windows 7.
How can I get the boot menu to show both options, to boot to XP or to Windows 7?
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Aug 8, 2012
I have dual boot with Xp and windows 7.when i log into my Xp all the restore points being deleted from windows 7.when i check the disk management information in 7 it shows windows 7 create a logical drive with my Xp primary drive.even i am hide the drive from both windows means Xp drive from windows 7 and vice verse.So i like to unmount or remove the drive partition of windows 7 from Xp and Xp primary from windows 7.So that they dont affect each others system files with being deleted the partitions.
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Apr 6, 2012
I installed opensuse 12.1 on dual boot along with my other windows 7 installation. Installation of opensuse is successful and i can use it. But when I tried to use windows 7 on grub, it says bootmgr is missing. I've already encountered this problem a long time ago so i tried to use bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot in the recovery console in the windows 7 DVD. Rebuildbcd and fixboot did not work and it said something like it cannot find my windows installation. I also tried bootrec /scanos, it returned a windows installation on D:\Windows but my windows is in drive C. I think this has something to do with me messing up the active partition in disk management a month ago but i already fixed it by setting the active partition to the system reserved partition. Only fixmbr is successful, but now i can't boot on any OS because it says: Missing operating system.I also tried bcdboot C:\Windows but it failed with a message that goes like: Failure when attempting to copy boot information..
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Sep 24, 2009
I was having win 7 RTM and i tried to installl OSx86 in second hard disk
after few failure i successfully installed OSx86 in my secondary had disk now the problem is that i cant boot win 7
i changed boot order i tried windows 7 disk repair
but both failed
im getting some Boot mldr missing...
Actually even OSx86 is not booting i get OSx86 boot screen with two hard disk to select if i select windows disk it still says the same Boot mldr missing.
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Dec 3, 2010
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
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Mar 11, 2009
How to Change the OS Name in Windows Boot Manager ?
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Dec 22, 2010
I had Windows XP on my Western Digital drive and I installed Windows 7 on my Seagate drive. I want to remove Windows XP from the Western Digital drive and format it to use as a data drive. How can I do this?
Disk Management:
Seagate (C:) Boot, Page File Active, Crash Dump Primary Partition
Western Digital (D:) System, Active, Primary Partition
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Feb 23, 2012
I recently added a hard drive to my computer (SSD), and installed Windows 7 x64 onto it. The result being a dual boot system, which by default boots to the SSD, and optionally (by Windows Boot Menu), can be booted to the original drive (standard mechanical drive).
Initial setup went fine, however I decided to customize the Windows Boot Menu, so that logical names could be associated with each operating system instance. To do this I used EasyBCD and I altered the names in the Windows Boot Menu from: Quote:
Windows 7
Windows 7
to... Quote:
Windows 7 - SSD
Windows 7 - Standard Drive
Shortly after the modification I noticed that I was no longer able to boot into the original OS. Instead I was being presented with a "Repair Windows" option. Figuring that my EasyBCD "tampering" may have had something to do with the issue I decided to change the names back to "Windows 7" in the Windows Boot Menu. However doing so had no positive impact on boot up of the original OS.
After booting again into the original OS I accepted the "Repair Windows" option, and then left the computer over night to do it's "thing". After completion of the "Repair" the situation has deteriorated -
* Windows doesn't load (the same as before)
* Windows doesn't present a "Repair Windows" option (it did before)
* The computer reboots a short period after the "Starting Windows" screen is presented
As a side note the drive is in good health, and all data on it can be read from within Windows 7 when I boot to the SSD OS.
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Aug 6, 2012
I have installed a year before UBUNTU on my pc with dual boot (i.e. use either window 7 or ubuntu).the NTFS partition that contains the UBUNTU was corrupted and i wanted to take the dual boot from my PC. I used the instructions from the web site: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...t-environment/but the disk management tool would not let me delete the NTFS partition.Could any one help me delete the NTFS partition and use just windows 7 as the only boot. step by step help would be great.
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Feb 17, 2009
I got windows 7 running fine for a while now and ever since my XP did not boot anymore.I was not worried to much about it since i did not need it at the time.But now i really REALY need it,See i got all my Cubase projects in there and my cubase plug-ins al setup in XP and i need to get to the projects?At first it did not do anything and using easyBCD did not help either.I cpoied ntldr and detect to the root of C: wich contains my XP and now it shows the bootscreen but hangs on a black screen.The thing is right before the bootscreen shows i see the text" invalid boot.ini" flashing by very quick.I am able to enter that winXP install in safe mode and i tried safe/vga mode as well wich works but thats all.
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Nov 9, 2012
I have a laptop I bought a year ago on which a created a dual boot Win 7 (32bit)/Win XP SP3 install, each on a separate partition. It was my first Win 7/XP dual boot install, and my first personal system that I allowed to have a Win 7 install on it at all, so although I have plenty of experience working on pretty much every previous version of Windows, I have very little experience with Win 7 and dual boot configs.
Today about 2 hours ago my audio spontaneously stopped worked for no good reason, so after shutting down each program to see if that cured it (which it didn't), I restarted the system. Out of the blue, for the first time I've ever experienced it, I received the msg "MBR Error 1" - Press any key to boot from floppy. I don't have a floppy of course on my laptop, and if I press any key I simply get the same msg. I turned the system off for a few minutes to make sure it was a good cold boot, but every time I still get the same msg. I tried switching the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI (IDE is required for XP to boot, AHCI required for Win 7), but I still get the same error msg before I'm even prompted with the OS boot selection, so it made no difference of course.
I looked up this issue and found various suggestions, but none of the ones I found took into consideration a dual boot config., they were all Win 7 specific solutions. I don't what to try and repair the MBR only to have it screw up my dual boot config and be unable to access XP, which is what I use almost exclusively, nor do i want to lose access to Win 7 if at all possible.
I had a backup HD of my complete system that I saved several months ago when I upgraded my HD, and I periodically refresh the most important files on it, so I'm currently running on the laptop in question using my old HD, and it's working just fine. Worst case I can just clone my old HD to my newer HD that's screwed up, but I'll still lose a lot of changes I've made to the OS since I upgraded the HD and have to reinstall and config a number of programs, so that's my last option. I'll also have to back up about 200GB of data from the newer HD which is much larger than my old HD, and then restore it back after the clone, something that will take a lot of time and unncessary effort if I can just fix the MBR.
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