[stemmer]

Hi,

I have three physical hard drives in my Win 7 computer. I installed Win7 Home Premium fine on a separate physical hard drive. Windows XP is installed on a second hard drive. The third hard drive is for data (video recording & dvd authoring)...

Win 7's disk manager will not allow me to delete the XP volume so I can remove it and replace it with a bigger drive. I tried the command line diskpart utility but it too would not allow me to delete the volume as it was in use....

Frustrated I disabled the drive in bios and Win 7 would not load saying the os is missing... Enabling the hard drive in bios at least allowed Win 7 to load...

How do I remove XP from the second hard drive so I can replace it with a bigger drive? How do I enable Win 7 to bootup after I remove the 2nd hard drive?

Thanks kindly....

[herbie]

Eaiest way is to do it again.
Disconnect all but the one you want Win7 on and install it.
Plug in your others and reboot. Format the old XP drive.

Your boot sector still points to XP.

[CanadianJeff]

I have not worked much with windows 7 but most BIOS will allow you to format any HD hard wired to your Motherboard. Just hit del when the com starts up to get into bios.

[Canadaka]

hmm your MBR and other boot files are probably on the drive with XP, its using that drive to boot and load Windows 7. I think you can move the boot files from XP drive to the root of the W7 drive. They are hidden system files, so you have to enable options to see them.

Not sure if that will work.

formatting the XP drive through a bios or other means, won't allow you to boot to your current W7, since it seems the bootmgr stuff is on the XP drive.

[stemmer]

The problem with re-installing is I'm using the Upgrade version of Home Premium Win 7 that requires a prior/qualifying copy of Windows XP or Vista be present and installed on the computer....

[Canadaka]

you can install the Windows 7 upgrade on a fresh format. What you have to do is boot from the DVD and install it using no CD-Key. Once installed, then choose to upgrade that OS, so you will re-install overtop the one you just did.

This is kinda a workaround, it works, just takes double the time to install.

[herbie]

stemmer wrote:

The problem with re-installing is I'm using the Upgrade version of Home Premium Win 7 that requires a prior/qualifying copy of Windows XP or Vista be present and installed on the computer....

You upgraded, but put the OS on the new drive, but the boot sector's on the old one. That's what happened.
Do you have something like Acronis where you can upgrade your existing drive, then clone and resize it to the new disk?

Or can you trade/sell the upgrade and get an OEM ? You can buy the OEM if you buy a new hard drive most places.

[stemmer]

I have Acronie True Image 2010 but not sure how I could merge the two hard drives into one hard drive using Acronis...

[stemmer]

I'm presently upgrading a third computer from XP to Win 7 (Home Premium Family Pack).This time I'm installing Windows 7 onto the same physical hard drive and partition as XP... In this install the primary hard drive is big enough...

[acidcomplex]

just a fyi , in this day and age partitioning is almost pointless , unless your looking for dualboot, hds no longer need to be partitioned in hopes of speeding up access etc.

[romanP]

That's not true. There is still a very useful point to partitioning, and it has to do with the situation this thread is about. When you have multiple operating systems, partitioning is not only important, it's often mandatory. It also helps to keep your operating system separate from everything else so that if, say, Windows gets destroyed by a virus, you can wipe that partition and start fresh without worrying about having to format over your 600gb media collection.

[Proculation]

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

[acidcomplex]

romanP wrote:

That's not true. There is still a very useful point to partitioning, and it has to do with the situation this thread is about. When you have multiple operating systems, partitioning is not only important, it's often mandatory.

Utterly Untrue, welcome to VM ware my friend. Problem solved

romanP wrote:

It also helps to keep your operating system separate from everything else so that if, say, Windows gets destroyed by a virus, you can wipe that partition and start fresh without worrying about having to format over your 600gb media collection.

Seriously? people still dont devote an entire HD or 4 to there media collection?. This also will make no difference when the virus jumps your partition. Also if anyone in there right mind has a collection that size and doesn't have its own separate psychical hard drive for there media, they deserve to lose it all

[BartSimpson]

romanP wrote:

That's not true. There is still a very useful point to partitioning, and it has to do with the situation this thread is about. When you have multiple operating systems, partitioning is not only important, it's often mandatory. It also helps to keep your operating system separate from everything else so that if, say, Windows gets destroyed by a virus, you can wipe that partition and start fresh without worrying about having to format over your 600gb media collection.

Anyone not backing up a 600GB media collection to a cheap external drive is missing something.

[Elvis]

Proculation wrote:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

???