Formatting question!

[SIW2]

Hi Bull,

Sorry I couldn't get back earlier.

You managed to make the Vista HD bootable, and deleted XP using the Vista dvd.

However, the XP drive will still be first in the boot device order.

When you reattached the XP HD, it became the System drive again as BIOS looked there first for a bootable device, found it, and used bootmgr and BCD on the XP drive to boot up Vista.

That is why you couldn't delete it with Disk Management. By changing the boot device order, XP could have simply been deleted from Disk Management.

That means every time you start up, BIOS will continue to look at what was the XP HD first to see if it is bootable, if not, it will then look at the next HD, the Vista one.

Might be a good idea to take torrentg's advice and make the Vista HD the first in the boot order. Either by physically swapping the connections, or by changing the order in BIOS.

Hope it helps.

 

[lbdm44]

After booted from the 7 DVD, the screen pops up to say "install now." Click that. Then choose to do a clean install. Then it will present you with places to install. Here, on the screen it will tell you to hit a button for advanced options. In the advanced oiptions, you can choose to format here.

I did that to try and do the same thing for my laptop and i got a BIOS message saying BOOTMGR is missing, and now i have to reinstall everything on my laptop...3P1C phail