Remove XP from XP & 7 dual boot

[GRR]

Afternoon all. Please could you help to achieve the above.

I dare say that this topic has been covered may times and apologise up front if that's true.

The PC was XP Pro and a while back I made it into a dual boot and installed 7 Pro on a new SSD

Now I want to remove the original XP hard disk but I suspect it won't boot at all if I do that.

The reason I installed 7 on a new drive was that I thought the original was sounding a bit cranky.

How can I achieve this? Copy the files required for booting to later drive?

I have uplodaded a screenshot to illustrate.

Cheers

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. It's two drives with all the boot files on the XP drive so win7 drive on its own won't boot the partition would need setting as active a a new boot sector do you have a Windows 7 DVD to do a repair?

 

[Megahertz07]

Samuria is right.
- Boot from Win 7
- Open disk manager and make disk 1 (Win 7) active.
- Shut down, remove disk 0 and place the SSD (win 7) on SATA 0
- Boot from Win 7 DVD, go to repair - do a Boot repair.
- Once you're able to boot from the SSD to win 7, attach the HDD (win XP) to SATA 1.
- Boot win 7, transfer your files from HDD to the SSD or to an external disk.
- Open disk manager, make the HDD inactive (important), delete all partitions and then format it as NTFS

 

[GRR]

Thanks people.

Is the last two lines of Megehertz reply only if I wish to keep the data from the XP drive?

(Which I don't)

Once 7 will boot I don't need any of the XP data.

Cheers

 

[AddRAM]

Nope.

But you could format it and start using it to store data, but if it`s bad, chuck it in the can.

Also, make sure the new ssd is hooked up to the #1 sata port on the motherboard.

 

[GRR]

I'm confused now. Can I just remove the original hard disk, place new SSD (the one with Win 7 loaded) on Sata 0 instead, boot from DVD, do a boot fix

Will that work?

Cheers

 

[AddRAM]

If you know how to use Diskpart yes it`s very easy, but it`s a lot simpler to mark the W7 partition Active before you remove the XP drive.

It has to be marked Active 1st in order to write the System files to it.

Partition - Mark as Active - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[GRR]

Ok so mark Disk 1 as active, shut down, remove Disk 0, boot using Win 7 DVD, do boot repair?

And where should disk 1 be, Sata 0 or Sata 1

Cheers

 

[AddRAM]

Whichever your board uses, 0 or 1.

Personally I`ve never seen a board with a sata port marked 0, only 1 through 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 etc.

The board will be clearly marked. Or at least it should be marked, the print is very small, a magnifying glass helps

The Bios will also tell you which port a drive is hooked to.

It`s actually called startup repair, and it doesn`t always work.

Startup Repair - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[GRR]

AddRam, I've used Diskpart before but I'm not what you'd call competent.

So how woulkd you do it, start to finish please?

Let's assume the "First" available Sata is number 1

Disk 0 is XP

Disk 1 is 7

Cheers

 

[AddRAM]

Already told you Mark Disk 1 Active and run startup repair. Just get W7 booting on its own, you can worry about the sata port later.

I would have never installed W7 with the XP drive hooked up.