Windows 7: Must have XP present to boot Win7

I'm sorry if I've overlooked the answer, but I've fought this all weekend and searched this forum (and others) extensively.

I previously had XP Pro 32-bit on a 320GB drive, and a 500GB drive set up with an Acronis True Image Home secure zone for backups. A couple of weeks ago I bought a 1TB drive and Windows 7 Pro 64-bit OEM. I added the new drive to my PC, formatted it, and did a clean (custom) install of Windows 7. Everything went well, I could dual boot to XP or Windows 7, and I love Windows 7.

Saturday I decided I didn't need XP any more. I did a final backup, removed XP from the bootup menu, and removed the XP drive. I can't boot. My BIOS says it can't find a bootable drive. If I put the XP drive back in I can boot just fine into Windows 7. I've tried the repair tool on the Windows 7 CD. I tried an update install over my current installation.

My long term goal was to move my Windows 7 installation to the 500GB drive and use the 1TB drive for backups. I did a clean install to the 500GB drive without XP present, but Acronis won't let me restore my Windows 7 backup (other than just files) to any other drive. I have two drives available, but Windows 7 backup only presents the CD/DVD drive as a destination.



I've just about resigned myself to starting over with the clean install I have now on the 500GB drive, but it's a lot of work to get everything installed and configured again. Does anyone have any ideas?

Welcome to the Forums! Relax, this should be an easy problem to get taken care of.
First off, follow the instructions in this post on how to mark your partition as active.
Once that is done, try running Startup Repair (found on the recovery CD) 3 times. This usually takes care of that problem. Keep the XP drive unplugged throughout this process.