New
#11
You're right... marking the Win7 hard drive as "hard disk #1" in the BIOS, and making its partition be the "active" partition on that drive, would probably eliminate the other WinXP partition from the "system image", since it's no longer really part of the boot process.
But I have no real problem with having it just the way it is... with the WinXP partition being "active" on HD#1, where the Win7 boot manager files are, and then selecting Win7 (which is the default item on the menu list) for booting. I only want to avoid always including the WinXP partition in the Win7 "system image" if it's possible... using either Macrium or some other Win7 functionality.
If reversing the "active" partitions, and making the WinXP partition just the second bootable OS on the boot manager menu accomplishes that, and that only the Win7 partition would now be auto-included in the "system image", then that seems like an excellent action to take.
I guess until I try it, I won't know for sure that all secondary OS's (i.e. their bootable system partitions) on the boot manger menu are not auto-included as part of the "system image", but it sounds like it would not be. Again, if the Win7 partition is now the "active" partition on BIOS HD#1, and the WinXP partition just is a second bootable OS and thus not "crucial" to system integrity and thus would not be auto-included in a "system image", then that would be a good thing in my opinion.
My probable approach to accomplishing this would be to use EasyBCD (which is already my replacement for the Win7 boot manager, and BCDedit) to simply plant the Win7 boot manager files on my Win7 partition in one step, rather than using the 3-repair method. I'd still need to get into BIOS to swap "hard disk #1". If EasyBCD doesn't mark that Win7 partition as "active" at the same time as it plants boot manager files on that partition, I could just use Partition Wizard to make that partition "active" on that drive. I much prefer to use "visual" programs to do significant things, using GUI dialogs and wizards... to maintain complete manual control over the results and fully see what it is exactly that I'm doing.