Stumbling with rearranging XP and Vista on drives

T

TimothyB

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 25, 2004
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Just bought retail home premium. Though, my computer currently has XP on my Raptor 74GB. I also have Vista RC1 installed on another drive's partition. XP's drive is C: and Vista is D: at the moment

I want to move XP off the Raptor so I can install full Vista onto that drive. I just used used Casper XP to copy the drive with XP to another disk, currenty labeled as F:. Though, it had one file it couldn't copy it said, some boot record.

Now that it's copied, I'm confused how to disable the original XP on Raptor C: and let the copy on F: to take over. That way when I reboot and the Vista RC1 dual boot screen comes up, the earlier version of windows option goes to that drive. Which once I get into that XP I'd install Vista while in it to the Raptor C drive. Not sure how it will handle or notice the Vista RC1 on another drive.

Right now under disk management here's the status of the drives:

Original XP (C: ) STATUS: Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
Vista RC1 (D: ) STATUS: Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Copied XP (F: ) STATUS: Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

So, how on earth do I get my computer to make the copied XP take over for the original XP so that I can run off that and install Vista over the original?
 
I don't know why I ever post here anymore, I thought there were some skilled tech users here. Sorry, it's just that my posts always seem to go unanswered.

Anyway, I figured it out. I found when I went into my bios and changed the harddrive boot priority to the drive with the XP that I wanted to start up in, it did, and ignored the Vista RC1 dual boot screen, just went straight to that XP.

Once in that XP, I put in Vista Home Premium and installed it on to the raptor that had the previous location of XP. The install told me there was a previous version of windows on it and would move it to an old folder, I wish it gave the option to just delete it right away.

So the install goes fine, and now when I restart, I get a triple boot screen, I see the version of XP I wanted, and I see a choice of both vistas, full retail and the RC1.
 
I was having similar troubles with my raptor mixed with my ide drives.

It would install the boot partition on the ide drive, but the system on the raptor so if I pulled the plug on my IDE drives I couldnt boot and it wouldnt let me format them from within vista.

I finally just unplugged everything but the drive I wanted vista to install onto and boot from. The system, boot partitions need to be on the same drive to get rid of the OS selection screen.
 
TimothyB said:
I don't know why I ever post here anymore, I thought there were some skilled tech users here. Sorry, it's just that my posts always seem to go unanswered.
Click to expand...
Well, that could very well be part of the problem. Did you ever stop to look at your own pst, and wonder if someone else NOT in front of your computer would have any idea what the hell is going on? I read your OP three times, and I still have no idea.

I read your post before, and thought about suggesting a full wipe and re-install, but that probably would have just returned more attitude as well.
 
To adjust which disk is used for booting please try these intsructions.

-Right click on the MY COMPUTER icon and select properties.
-Click on the advanced tab.
-Under STARTUP AND RECOVERY click settings
-Under SYSTEM STARTUP click edit

You will now be in you BOOT.INI file

it will look like this.
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

If you dual boot you will see more than one listed here.
Adjust the numbers accordingly to fit which disk/partition you now use for you NEW MS XP.

If you have 3 physical disks your number should 2 if it is on the third disk. (0,1,2)

Good luck and double check everything
 
djnes said:
Well, that could very well be part of the problem. Did you ever stop to look at your own pst, and wonder if someone else NOT in front of your computer would have any idea what the hell is going on? I read your OP three times, and I still have no idea.

I read your post before, and thought about suggesting a full wipe and re-install, but that probably would have just returned more attitude as well.
Click to expand...


I'm sorry, it was fustrating night. I thought it was clear I just wanted to install Vista on the drive that currently had XP because it was the faster drive, a Raptor. So I used some software to copy XP over to another drive so I wouldn't have to reinstall it.

One problem, after I copied it I didn't know how to get the computer to start on the copy so I could install Vista over the original on the raptor. It was even more complicated to me that I already had Vista RC1 on a 3rd drive. So I had a lot of worry if things were not done just right I would not get a dual boot option.
 
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