Windows 7 Dual Boot / Move one installation / BCD?

Hello,

at the moment I got two Windows 7 installations on a single hard drive. A W7 Ultimate x64 for my office applications and a seperated W7 Home Premium x64 for all of my games.

W7 Ultimate is on the first partition (C:\) and Home Premium is on the 2nd partition - it was installed from within Ultimate so it has the drive letter D:\.

I now want to move the second installation to a new harddrive. This would have been an easy task with the goold old boot.ini - just editing the disk and partition number (example: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP") to suite the new situation after moving the content of partition 2 to the second harddrive.

Is there a similar command for the bcdedit to just change to target of the bootloader for Home Premium from disk(0) partition(2) to disk(1) partition(1)?

Thanks for hints. :)


Cheers Bill

Do you want to create a dual boot menu where each HD is dependent on the other with first-installed holding the MBR and second-installed holding the boot files? This is harder to extricate.

A much easier way is to use the BIOS Boot Menu F-key (given on first boot screen) to choose which HD you want to boot, with the default set in BIOS setup which drive is to boot first, second, etc. I would make DVD first, then Win 7 HD you visit most, then other WIn7 HD.

If this is the way you want to do it, then first make a Win7 Backup Image stored externally in case you need to start over as moving operations can fail.

Next mark Active then clone the second partition over to the new drive, or Set Active then Copy it using free Partition Wizard bootable CD. Delete the old partition.

Next unplug one HD and boot into Windows 7 DVD Repair console and run Startup Repair 3 times to repair and then rewrite the MBR.

Now unplug the other HD and repeat.

This gives you two independent drives whose boot order is controlled in BIOS, or overridden by using the F-key for Boot Menu given on the first bootup screen.

If you want an interdependent dual-boot menu please post back a screenshot so we can advise you better, using the Snipping Tool in Start Menu, attaching file using paper clip in reply box.

Thanks for your reply. I wanted to have again a boot menu to select the OS. At the moment this menu is present as Home Premium installation was started from within Ultimate and detected the first installation.

I already had this setup with XP on two different HDDs. So I basically want Ultimate to boot from HDD1 and Home to boot from HHD2 while they share a boot menu with default selection etc.

I am quite sure that this would have worked if i had installed the Home Premium on the second hdd from the beginning but unfortunately it is installed on the 2nd partition at the moment and i want to move it to HDD2 and adjust the boot menu accordingly.

Thanks again!

What you wish to do splitting dual boot partitions to move one partition to another HD is complicated but we help people do them here all the time.

Please post back a screenshot of your full Disk Management map so we can advise you better. Use the Snipping Tool in the Start Menu, attaching file using paper clip in reply box.

You will also need to burn to CD free Partition Wizard, and have the Win7 DVD to boot into repair console and recover the MBR after the move.

Hi and thanks for the tutorial. I'm currently running windows 7 x64 with a dual boot of 7 and xp. I first installed windows 7 then I made a partition and installed xp on the partition. Then I use easyBCD. Well now to the question I really don't need xp at the moment so how to revert the changes so that I don't have xp, leaving only win7.

Mark Win7 Active in XP Disk Management, or from the booted Win7 DVD Repair Command Line: Partition - Mark as Active

Then boot the Win7 DVD to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times to return the System MBR to Win7: Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

When Win7 starts up, delete XP in Disk Management.

Thanks I successfully remove windows xp and currently running on win7 only.