Windows 7: Moving boot sector to another partition

I have gone through hours upon hours of work to try to seperate my windows 7 hard drive from my XP's boot sector. I managed to get it to work but with a catch, I now have 2 windows 7's and the junk one is being used as the boot partition.

Right now I am running without my XP HDD to make things simpler. The HDD I have has 3 partitions. 2 are meant for operating systems and the other for game storage. The first partition on the HDD is my main windows 7 partition. The second partition is another windows 7 instal that I installed on it, to get the boot sector to work. The boot sector now lives but it is on my second (junk) partition.

I want to move my boot sector from the second partition to the first, where it should have been in the beginning. However I have been having trouble doing so and thought I would get input from people that have done this before spending 8 hours trying to figure out how to do it.



After moving I want to delete my second partition and clone my XP drive onto it, but that is a different issue that can wait.

Please post back a screenshot of your maximized Disk Management drive map with listings using the Snipping Tool in Start Menu.

The normal procedure is to mark the Windows 7 partition Active to run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until it boots on its own and has the System flag on it.

However there can be complications if the partition is Logical and must be converted to Primary first to be marked Active. There are other factors which make seeing the screenshot necessary first.

o_o wait.... 3 times...? Why doesn't it work the first time?

Also I make everything a primary drive since I don't usually make more than 3 partitions per drive



as much as I hate to do it I am at the point where I am willing to reinstall everything to fix this if the solution is too much of a pain in the ass. I never transferred files from XP to this one yet, just installed a ton of programs.

It doesn't work with just 1 time, because each time builds upon the solid foundation laid down by the previous time.
Oh yes, I think there is actually a tutorial here with a detailed explanation. I've never worried about it. I simply do it. The three times works!.

I do not argue with success.

According to the screenshot C is booted and holds the System Active flags. As you said that the temporary Windows 7 was on second partition (labeled XP) you can now delete that partition and then recreate it in Disk Mgmt:
Partition or Volume - Delete
Partition or Volume - Create New

After some testing it seems the boot property changes depending on which OS I use. I guess it got fixed at some point last night XD now to format the XP drive and see if it still works.