Dell 630 i Boot

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zavier

Weaksauce
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Oct 7, 2006
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About 5 years ago I purchased a Dell desktop 630 i. It came with Vista Home. Two years ago I purchased Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade and I installed it on an SSD with dual boot. (unfortunately, during the install, I did not disconnect the Vista drive)

The Dell Desktop is equipped with an Intel Core Duo CPU E8400 3.0GHz.
RAM 4.0 GB
Windows 7 64bit Service Pack 1 OS
and Vista 32bit OS on separate hard drive.

Win 7 is my default OS and I use it 100% of the time.
At the moment Win 7 (C: Drive) is label: Primary - boot
Vista (E: Drive) is label: System - Primary
I don't use Vista anymore so in the future I may want to delete it.

At the moment everything is working fine, but my concern is that if E: disk fails (or if I delete Vista from it) "I think" I won't be able to boot into Win 7 (C:).
I Google around for an answer and found this:

Download EasyBCD. It is free for non-commercial use, just click the "Download free for limited, non-commercial use" link.
After downloading, start EasyBCD. Select the Tool from the "toolbox" for "BCD Deployment."
Make sure that your SSD is selected in the upper box (the partition on the SSD).
Click the Radio button for "Install the Vista/Win7 bootloader to the MBR"
Click "Write MBR". (This will make a copy of your current BCD onto your SSD.)
Before exiting, click the "View settings" tool, and make sure the Entry shows drive C:\ as the default windows 7 entry. If it does, you're done.
Shut windows down, reboot, and then in disk management youcan delete the 100mb partition from your HDD, and then extend the other partition on the drive to use the space.

Is this what I need to do to make C: drive System Primary with the boot info in it ??
Should I do this now ??
Thanks for your help.
 
Turn off computer, remove vista drive, see what happens when you turn it back on

I'd have my money on 7 booting up, but if it doesn't, put the vista drive back in.
 
BigTed; Thanks for your reply:

Does it matter if it's XP on the E: drive ??

For example - Win 7 (C: Drive) is label: Primary - boot
Win XP (E: Drive) is label: System - Primary

The reason I ask is that my other desktop is configured in that fashion.
 
bigted: I think you will loose your bet. I bet if I pull Vista drive out, Win 7 won't boot. Reason (I think) is because MBR is on Vista disk. (Any comments/corrections here are welcome). Put Vista disk in, now nothing boots. I would then need to insert Win 7 DVD (which I have) and fix Win 7. Not sure what would happen to Vista. Sometimes that works, sometimes it does not. Worst case, reinstall Win 7.

That's why on post #1, I asked if EasyBCD would fix the boot. It's so much easier.

Does anyone have any experience (or guess) for the fix using EasyBCD ???
 
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