No Boot Partition

Hi, I initially installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit along side my Windows XP 64 bit on two seperate hard drives. What I'm trying to do is remove the drive that had XP on it and put it in my other system to do a fresh Raid 0 Windows 7 setup. But when I remove the XP drive, it wont boot into Windows 7. I'm fairly sure that Windows 7 rewrote the XP bootsector and so without that drive it wont boot. Can I recreate it on the Windows 7 drive?

I've tried the recovery stuff on the DVD, including all the command line tricks in the tutorials. When I go into the recovery mode, it doesn't even see my Windows 7 installation. However, in Command Prompt mode, i can browse into the hard drive, and see all the windows files.

What can I do without a fresh install?

Unplug the XP HD, either plug Win7 into its cable or change boot order in BIOS to boot Win7 HD after DVD drive.

Boot into Win7 DVD Repair console and click through to Recovery Tools to run Startup Repair 3 times, as it will try several fixes before rewriting the MBR to Win7.

If this fails, boot back into Repair Command Line and run "bootrec.exe /fixboot" and "bootrec.exe /fixmbr"

or if those don't work "Bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force".

grimesbot said:

Hi, I initially installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit along side my Windows XP 64 bit on two seperate hard drives. What I'm trying to do is remove the drive that had XP on it and put it in my other system to do a Raid 0 Windows 7 setup. But when I remove the XP drive, it wont boot into Windows 7.

I've tried the recovery stuff on the DVD, including all the command line tricks in the tutorials. When I go into the recovery mode, it doesn't even see my Windows 7. However, in Command Prompt mode, i can browse into the hard drive, and see all the windows files.

What can I do without a fresh install?

When you dual bbot XP and win 7 win 7 puts the boot files on the XP root in a hidden folder called "boot" . When you remove the xp drive the boot files disappear. What you can do is use bcdedit to modify the boot loader. instruction are here BCDEDIT - How to Use

Hope this helps and let us know when you are ready to do it


Ken J+

Okay so it was a no go...

Tried the DVD Startup repair three times, no go. bootrec.exe said there was no such element. "bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force" was successful, but it didnt boot when I restarted. Tried doing the repair again after bootsect, still no go.

I didnt try bcdedit because I had concluded what I needed to edit didnt exist yet.

I went back into windows and used EasyBCD to "Reset BCD storage" which seemed to actually create what I needed on the C: drive (what wasnt created because 7 just wrote onto the boot part of the XP drive). Still, didnt boot. However, I did another 7 DVD startup restore and whadya know, it boots!

Thanks so much guys.

Actually, all of those bootrec, bootsect, BCD, etc. commands are supposed to be automated in Win7 Startup Repair, run after the all of tests it runs.

For some reason, twice now I've had to go in and run bootrec and bootsect commands, then Startup Repair could finish the job. Strange.

Meanwhile, SIW2 reports that EasyBCD 2.0 beta can rebuild the Win7 MBR in one click.