Mess - yes. In a nutshell . I had a Dell Vista PC (two bootable drives), did a cllean install (custom/format) and yes, never physically disconnected anything,.
Goinf forward, if I am able to totally wipe C ad D clean (somehow), and attempt to reinstall, will the Win 7 upgrade DVD still work or will it complain it cant find a Vista licence ?. Even if its smart enough to prompt me to put in a Vista CD, will it accept the Dell OEM Vista CD as a valid licence to upgrade from???
Might this work ? :
1) Disconnect the D drive
2) Boot from the Windows 7 DVD and select Startup Repair
If that does not work then:
3) Boot from the Windows DVD and select Command Prompt and and follow the insturctions here
MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record
If that does not work then:
4) Perhaps I need to resitall Vista, then resintall Win 7 clean.
(Deal with the D drive later)
If you have a legal previous Vista installation (which I think you do?)
If you have the Windows 7 retail upgrade disks
then you might want to have a look at this tutorial
Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version
To eradicate my messed up boot setup and inability to work with the backup drive, I am currently executing this plan of attack:
- - boot with a emergency disc
- - wipe the d drive
- - reboot into my bios setup
- - turn-off the backup drive (I figured in win 7 can see it,won't put boot files there
- - reinstall win 7 with no activation or updates
- - confirm clean boot prompts and location of system partition
- - activate
- - reboot and enable the second drive in bios
- - format the d drive and make it an active partition
- - make an base image of the c drive (store on backup drive)
- - update service packs
- - bring back user files
- - reload apps
- - take a another image and refresh occasionally
- - resume normal backup
So far so good. At step 6.
Are you asking for comment? I'll assume yes.
I would have gotten rid of the Dell remnants (partition structure etc) on disk 0 and ended with a nice clean install.
By "d drive" do you mean the full second disk marked disk 1 in your screenshot?
Why would you want to make this "backup" disk active? It shouldn't be.
With your update disks you can always go back and reconfigure later if you want.
I believe I am now back in control, and my problem solved.
The key (for me)was disabling the backup drive in the BIOS first ; then upgrading to Win 7.
- I can now boot properly
- I see only a single entry in the Boot list , ie WIndows 7
- My boot and system files are now on the boot drive and are not split across two drives.
- I can clone and I can image
- I can boot with both drives connected, or either drive connected ( I made both drives bootable)
Yes, I did blow way that DELL parition as well. I also tried shrinking / expandin g /merging the resultant free 10GB ion to get that unalllocated 10GB into the larger partition, but did not want to push that one too far !
My disk map is attached.
Thank youto everyone here for offering great advive and being patient with my very long nightmare install. Amazingly I did not lose any files through it all.
Well then for the curious why have you made D: active?
I can only see it as inviting trouble if you need to do a system repair at a later stage.
Its not that I explicitly chosse to make it active, but that's how it ended up. You correct, I dont neceessarily need it bootable - its jsut for data storage.
But recall, I was dealing with an absloute mess with the system/boot files spread over two drives. not being able to perform images, having Vista remnants everywhere it, 3 minute cold boot up times, etc, etc
Whereas now, its the cleanest its ever been, all my normal functions have returned, only one OS entry for appears on boot up, no Vista remnants appear anywhere, only one drive has the System/Boot, and I can boot from either drive if one is unavailable.
To me, naively perhaps, these were good things, and I thought I did real good!
To me, if one of the drives messed up to the point its in need a system repair, then I would either
- protect the good drive by disconnnting it while I ran a system repair on the bad one, or
- run an energ disk and load an image
- boot from the good drive and physically replace the bad one.
If I am inviting trouble , I am not knowlwdgable enough to recognize it.
I do not know how ( yet) to make a drive "un-active". How does one do it? If it involves another re-intrall, I am too drained !!
I know many users of the Dell forum have preceisely this setup. My other Win 7 machine ( hihc came with WIn 7) is the same ; I simple added a drive, and cloned from C drive to it. That machine as well only has System/Boot on one disk. and both C and D are Active.
I guess I am missing part of the picture, not seeinh the negatives but at least I am in better shape from the mess I started from!
Last edited by mediaman09; 09 Sep 2011 at 15:45.
I would just go with a clean istallation of 7 as in the tutorial mjf linked. No upgrade. As long as that a legit upgrade key, you will be fine. You already have Vista.
What I would do is this...
1) backup any personal DATA you do not want to loose. This will delete everything on BOTH drives.
2)Boot from your Win7 DVD
3)At the first screen, open the commad prompt and type:
diskpart
4)When it loads, type: list disk
this will show you the number of the disk. It should be Disk 0 and 1.
Next type:
select disk 0
clean
selects disk 1
clean
This will delete both drives, partiton structure etc leaving both with unallocated space.
Now, exit diskpart and the Win7 installation, shutdown your PC.
Disconnect 1 of the drives for now. This is mainly to ensure theres little chance of any no or accidents during the installation. Windows can only go in one place.
Leave only the 1 HD connected you want Windows on.
Boot up from the Win7 DVD and do a clean install Windows 7, via the tutorial mfj linked.
Once Windows is up and running, and all is OK, shutdown and re-connect your other drive.
Boot into Windows and go to DiskManagement.
Now you can set up the secondary drive, format and partion it however you see fit.
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