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I know I f'd up when I installed Vista on a second drive in my PC. XP Pro was already installed on the main drive. I had both drives connected when I installed Vista. Now, if I disconnect the Vista drive, the PC won't boot from the XP drive anymore! Both drives must be connected and running, then I can boot from either drive. (see also my question about changing BOOT order in the Nvidia board section)

Now I have a third drive to install Win7 pre beta onto and I want to make sure I don't hose either of my existing Windows (any worse than I already have ) Disconnect the first 2 drives then install Win7? Chris.

There is a bunch of articles in the MS knowledge base about multi-booting, some on how to recover from miscues. Basically the newest has to install first. Disconnecting the other drives will work, reconnecting and changing the boot order at startup is another way to make it work.

•First method, from Long Zheng
Boot your computer in to Windows XP.
Ensure you have the Vista DVD image emulated or in the DVD drive.
Go to “Start” and “Run”. Type in “e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force” (without quotes, and replacing e: with the drive letter of your Vista DVD).
Restart the computer, and you will notice the boot selection menu is gone.
Format the partition/drive where you had Vista installed.
Remove two files (Boot.BAK & Bootsect.BAK) on your XP drive’s root folder (C:), these were backup files of your previous bootloader, now no longer useful.
Optional: Restart to ensure it still works.
Use your partition software to merge your partitions together.

•Second Method from Tech-Recipes
Dual-booting with vista can be a little tricky to remove because of the new bootloader.
Playing with dual-boot systems has killed many people’s hard drives. I would suggest massive back-ups before you try to remove part of a dual-boot system. If you mess up, you might be unable to boot to any of your partitions. You do this at your own risk.
Here’s the basic steps you need to do:
1. Backup, backup, backup
2. Reboot and Boot to your XP CD-ROM
3. Start the Recovery Console
4. Run Fixboot
5. Run fixmbr to reset the master boot record
6. Exit the Recovery Console
7. Reboot
8. To remove the extra entry, edit the boot.ini file to remove the “Microsoft Windows Longhorn” entry.
9. Format Your Vista Partition

Are you sure about the NEWEST first? I have always been under the impression, they need to be done in oldest to newest or the bootloader gets screwed up.

Read this article: Microsoft Sucks

Note down in the MORE INFORMATION section:

Creating a multi-boot configuration that includes Windows Vista
To create a working multi-boot configuration, install the oldest version of the Windows operating system first. Then, install each newer version in order. Every new Windows version preserves backward compatibility for starting earlier Windows versions.

And if by chance you did screw something up, mabye something like this would help: Microsoft Sucks still

Greybear wrote:Are you sure about the NEWEST first? I have always been under the impression, they need to be done in oldest to newest or the bootloader gets screwed up.

He had done that. He already had a drive with XP on it. I have tried what Chris is trying and the computer will not boot. It needs the two drives installed. It put the boot loader on both HDD's. I know it sucks when you want to remove one.

I agree that Microsoft sucks 100%

I had tried to do the "Repair" of XP back when I first hosed that one when I installed Vista on a second drive with the XP drive still connected. I then got a boot list like this:
"Newer version of Windows"
"Older version of Windows"
"Older version of Windows"
That was a list I got every time I wanted to boot into XP. I didn't get any choices at all when I selected the Vista drive.

That is really not an issue anymore since I have all but abandoned XP. I keep that drive in the system because it has a 50Gb "backup" partition that has all my files, pictures, music, bookmarks and downloaded stuff that I can access from any other drive in my system.

So, this morning, I decided to try and load Win7 on the new 80Gb drive with all 3 drives connected. Install seemed to go o.k., but it won't boot from that drive. BIOS says "Boot from CD" even thos that hard drive is selected as the BOOT drive, then I get an error: "Boot Disk Error: please insert boot disk and press any key" so something's not right here.

Gonna disconnect the first 2 drives and load Win7 onto the new drive with only that drive connected. Oh, it did not do any damage to either of the other drives. Chris.

All righty now. I disconnected all the hard drives except for the one I wanted to install Win7 onto, booted from the DVD (it's over 4Gb compressed ) installed Win7 and lo and behold. It runs, it boots even when the other drives are reconnected. I am running Win7 right now. Gotta find a LOT of drivers before I can even try to play a game. Gotta remember it's 64 bit. I'll start another Thread about Win7. Maybe. If I don't throw it out the window first/ Chris.