How to Uninstall W7 When In A Multi-Boot

SIW2 said:

Hi Smarteyeball,

Thanks for posting the screenshot - it's interesting.


Was that a new hd that you partitioned with Win7 during the installation ?

It's a good thing as you can make an image of that 200mb partition to restore in an emergency. I have the Paragon Drive Backup, which lets you make a small bootable cd - so you can boot in , find the backup image and restore it - I assume Acronis etc are pretty much the same?

No worries :) and yep, it was a brand spanking new unformatted drive.

Funny you should mention backing up that boot partition. Last night I tried using the Vista back up and restore centre and it refused to work. Insufficient space errors due to Volume Shadow Copy. Since there was no option to deselect the 200MB partition in the GUI backup, I used the wbadmin cmd line to back up the Vista partition alone and it worked. I then tried it on the 200Mb partition with no success. I'm going to give Acronis a go later and see how it goes.

(BTW, the target drive had 298GB free space, so that's not an issue )

Just tried backing up the 200MB on it's own with Acronis. It worked. Sort of:



Trying to restore from within Vista:




When I added the second HD and split it into two, I was presented with either creating a MBR disk or a GPT disk. Guess which one I selected?

frankzappa77 said:

Wait, so SIW2, what you're saying is (assume fresh install on a clean hard drive), if I had a 100GB HD and I (hd0,0) was a 200MB partition and the rest 99.8GB was (hd0,1), I can guide the 7 installer to install boot files to the 200MB partition?

Does that mean that when I get to the disk management page in the setup, that I select (hd0,0) as my installation partition? or will it automatically install the boot files to the first partition?

As for a backup of my boot record (not windows boot files), I use HD Hacker to create a raw image of my MBR just incase.

Also, just to clear something up with the 'active' partition thing. I recall when I installed OS X, I had to mark my 4th primary partition dedicated towards it as 'active' through the command line. I then decided to boot up GParted and check how the flags were re-associated, and my Vista partition was no longer the boot partition, (hd0,3) was. This insured that my MBR was not touched, and Darwin was installed to the bootsector of (hd0,3) - my question, does the same go for Windows?

Say I had GRUB on the MBR, can I tell Windows not to touch the MBR by flagging my second partition (or whichever partition I want to install it onto) as 'active'/boot?

Thanks for all the info so far everyone.

Hi Frankzappa,


Yes, if you set the first partition as Active on the boot drive HD0, then subsequent installs of Windows will place their boot files on it. You could point the Windows installer at any partition , on any HD, and it will still place it's boot files on that first Active partition.

That will be the only partition containing bootmgr, and each instance of Vista/ Win 7 will be started from there.

IMHO it's a good idea to set up a small 200mb partition as you suggest.

That way , the System partition will be separate from the Boot partitions containing the o/s's - so you could reformat/ reinstall one of them without messing up the ability to boot up the others.


Alternatively, you could set up each partition as Active before installing - then each partition would have it's own bootmgr -but you would need a 3rd party app. that could access the VBR at the start of each partition, which would then find the bootmgr on that partition and continue the process. I presume that's what Darwin did ?

SIW2

Hello farnkzappa77.

I used to have everything he ever did. Are you still raising up your little dental floss?

Have a look at this.

Windows Vista startup process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sorry I'm not much help with the rest of it; just wanted to say hello.









Later Ted

Hi Frankzappa.,

Grub and Lilo are 2 Linux boot management programs.

Bootmgr is part of the Vista / Win7 boot process.

Ntldr is part of XP boot process.

Bootmgr reads the BCD file and then heads off to start the winload.exe on the appropriate boot partition. Winload.exe actually loads the o/s on the Boot partition. This is probably best described as the bootloader ?

Previous Windows o/s had both those functions rolled into one program called ntldr - which was referred to as the bootloader.


AFAIK, this is how it goes - please feel free to correct or add more detail , anyone.

The BIOS starts the Program Loader - any BIOS should find it as it is on the first sector of the HD.

In Windows o/s, the Program Loader only "sees" the Volume Boot Record on the first few sectors of the System, Active partition. (The Program Loader finds out which is the Active partition by looking at the Partition table).

The VBR is written during installation, so it "knows" where bootmgr is ( also on the System, Active partition ).

Bootmgr then reads the BCD file ( on the System, Active partition) to find out which partition has been selected to be booted.

Bootmgr then starts up winload.exe on the selected partition - the Boot partition. ( You can find winload.exe in C:\Windows \System32\Boot).

Winload.exe then starts ntoskrnl.exe and so on till, with any luck , you see the selected Windows o/s.

The MBR is the program loader and I believe, the partition table - I believe this is what will be imaged when you image the MBR.

Subsequent installs of Windows o/s will overwrite the bootmgr and make themselves the default, but list previous o/s as well. Unless you install XP afterwards , of course.

Hope it helps

SIW2

Hello SIW2.

Thanks; that helps me too.















Later :) Ted