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#1
How to consolidate boot assets to a single drive
Hello
I have created what I think may be a unique situation and am looking for methods to correct.
A little history of events that lead up to this and problems created;
in the screen capture, the C drive is a RAID10 which initially housed Windows XP
Drive L is an external USB backup recently added so I can safely address the situation.
When I Installed Windows7 (full, not upgrade), I wanted it to reside on my RAID10 disks, so in preparation for this, I reinstalled my XP onto a different disk because I wanted to set a dual boot when I installed Windows 7.
Please see attached screen capture for drive details.
After installing Windows 7, I get an intermediate error on boot stating Boot Error. Sometimes I need to boot up to 4 or 5 times before my system will boot up to Windows 7. The error is not predictable, sometimes I can boot system up several times without error.
Since I have zero issues prior to installing Windows 7, my first thing was to upgrade my RAID drivers for Windows 7. This did not fix the issue, Next I did a Firmware update on my Adaptec Card. This did not fix the problem.
I then removed my dual boot using EasyBCD. Still no fix. When I attempted to format the other drives Windows tells me it cant due to system disk.
I am thinking that I must have bits and pieces or all parts needed to boot sitting on other drives which might be getting timed out during the boot with the system having to search for what is needed.
I have full back-ups of everything on my Drive L so worst case, if I had to reinstall Windows and everything, it can be safely done. As known, this would be very time consuming, thus I want to keep that as a last resort.
Ultimately, what I would like is my primary system, Windows 7 to reside only on my RAID10 and not dependent on any of the other disks. Then reinstall my XP onto one of the other disks with a Dual boot. I have some very useful secondary application that will only run under XP which why I want to keep an active version of XP on my system.