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Dual Boot: XP and 7: Want to Format the XP and move MBR to 7
I have two internal hard drives. I had XP for many years until the recent loss of support for XP by Microsoft, so I decided at that time to install Windows 7 on one of my other hard drives. To make my transition to 7 smoother, I installed 7 on a previous storage drive, basically dual-booting for a little while. Now I would like to format and clean out the XP drive and make that my storage drive - but my system is still viewing the XP drive as the "active, boot drive" and won't allow me to format it. Even if I unplug that drive and attempt to boot only to the 7 drive, it won't let me.
I did some searching and found this thread, many years old, that describes my problem exactly:
Moving MBR to Windows 7 drive
I DL'ed, burnt to a CD Mini Tools Partition Wizard, and was able to convert my Windows 7 Drive to Active. It displays the Windows 7 HD as: Primary Active & System, but with the XP disk removed from the computer, I am still unable to boot to this HD. I attempted the x3 repair process with my Windows Disks, and it isn't even seeing the Windows 7 OS for some reason, and is asking for HD drivers...
I think I am failing to apply the MBR to the Windows 7 HD and not sure which way to go now.
One other thing, not sure if it is related, but the Windows 7 disk also has a 8MB Unallocated partition on it.