Solved Install Win7 to Logical partition?

[AlanJS]

I still can't use diskpart to set the logical partition as active

You need to convert it to a PRIMARY partition before it can be marked Active. You need a 3rd party partitioning tool for that.

Couple of very good free ones :

Standard edition is free

Free Partition Manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard


Home edition is free

Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

Edit: Greg beat me to it.

Home edition is free, but home edition does not enable converting from logical to primary. I thought this was the same with EaseUS (but there is confusion over this, more in the edit). You can verify my claim without installing it here (6th bullet in right list):

Upgrade AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to Professional Edition

Here is a wayback link in case someone is asking the same question 2 years in the future.

Upgrade AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to Professional Edition

UPDATE:

Regarding EaseUS, it gives an error when trying to convert the partition to primary. Error is "System or boot partition cannot be converted!"

View attachment 317180

Also, I ran into this problem before, but the significance wasn't obvious to me. Because it throws an error, I can't verify if it could do the operation if there wasn't an error. But if EaseUS won't make the conversion because you just simply can't convert a logical system partition to primary, then how did other people have success with this issue?

Note, I have also encountered a prompt for a license when trying to convert the other partition from primary to logical. This would seem to contradict its advertised features. However... it seems to work with the older 9.1.0 version. In other places, people have reported the conversion option just not showing up in Windows 8, although I do not know if that is related or not.

 

[gregrocker]

Use Partition Wizard. It is the most important tool we use here which has helped in tens of thousands of complicated partitioning operations we've helped with here without a single failure.

Download the ISO and burn CD using Windows Image Burner.

Unplug the XP drive, boot PW CD to do operations I gave you above, then boot Win7 disk to do the Startup Repairs until Win7 starts.

 

[AlanJS]

Thanks gregrocker. These instructions worked. I will recap some of my experience.

On the second page of this thread, I mentioned a "POST" error. I noticed that this error came regardless of whether I was booting to a flash drive or to the intended drive. Disabling the main SATA drives in the bios (not just removing from the boot sequence) got rid of this error. I lack a more in-depth analysis, but it is clearly separate from factors related to a drive's MBR and such. So that was a red herring. For anyone repeating this procedure, I would suggest disabling the main SATA drives in the BIOS in the first place, as opposed to unplugging them and dealing with this error.

I installed Partition Wizard's Home bootable CD to a flash drive using Rufus.

Next, I disconnected the old drive and booted into the Partition Wizard. It worked exactly as other users said it would. It offers a full graphical interface the same as what you see when ran as a program within Windows. In this mode, it fully allowed me to set the partition as primary. It also allows setting it as active.

With the partition set as primary and active, I went into my Win7 bootable flash drive and ran the repair utility. Notably, within the "System Recovery Options", it just claimed to find problems at first.

After those changes were applied, and I booted into the Win7 bootable flash drive again. The options being presented looked different this time. it detected the specific operating system. More options followed after that, which included "Startup Repair". That gave a detailed "Diagnosis and repair details" log, which gave a list of "Root cause found". One of these included "Boot sector repair".

That was clearly encouraging, and after that the computer booted using only the new drive without throwing any errors.

 

[gregrocker]

Yes, that's the way it works best: Mark the Primary System Reserved or C partition Active, then run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times to make sure it takes care of everything, the last repair being rewriting the Repair My Computer console to F8 Advanced Boot Options. Make sure you have that now.

Previously we had no more automated solution since Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD
did not rewrite Repair to F8, but this appears to now have been added so it is an acceptable automated method. However you'd have to have a Primary partition marked Active first.

Good work, Alan!

 

[Layback Bear]

Great job Alan following instruction and putting 2 & 2 together and coming up with 4.