How to de-couple dual boot

[Malam]

I have Windows XP and Vista running on two separate drives as a dual boot. I did this to try and evaluate Vista and ensure that there will be no hardware hicups. Now I think I do not need to carry both OS anymore. How do I remove Windows XP and leave Vista as the only OS. I hope I won't have to reinstall Vista.

Thanks.

 

[vintank]

I am not 100% sure on how to do this, but would guess that you will have to manual edit the MBR (master boot record) and remove the line that is for Windows XP and once that is complete I would recommend booting to command prompt only and format the XP drive, or use a bootable program like HDDpro I believe that is what it is called

but as I said I am not 100% sure I know I did the above and it worked for me but there might be a better to do it as if you mess up the MBR you could be screwed and have to reinstall anyways

 

[Jack Rabbit]

Which disk is first? If VISTA is on disk 0 (the first one) you can probably just take the XP disk out and it would work. If XP is on disk 0 and VISTA is on disk 1 then the boot information will be on the XP disc and will need to be moved. You may want to read up on the two systems on Wikipedia:

Windows NT startup process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Windows Vista startup process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is also some links to software to help configure the settings for you. Dealing with the bootloader is not easy. One wrong step and you computer will not boot. If you do not have good backups or a lot of time and another computer to research how to fix it you may want to just reinstall Vista as that only takes a couple hours.

 

[Guest]

I just did this It is pretty easy actually, The MBR was on the XP disk.

All I did was format the XP disk, boot off of the Vista dvd, click install, then click repair Boot settings, reboot. only thing was I couldnt target where the MBR went so now its still on the formated XP disk. Thinking about it now I should have unhooked my XP disk and then it Should have targeted my vista install.

 

[vintank]

see I knew there had to be an easy way, thats awesome Supergrover and yeah unhooking would of been good wonder if that would make any changes to drive letter paths and possibly mess up installed programs in Vista though, could end up making you have to fix a lot of pathways

 

[Jack Rabbit]

Right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage". Then select Storage | Disk Management and look at the pictures representing your discs. The should say Healthy (<blah>) where <blah> is uaually "Primary Partition". One will also say "Boot" and this is your boot partition. (There may also be other stuff like Page File, Active, Crash, etc.)

My guess is that both XP and VISTA will say the first partition on DISC 0 will be your boot drive. If this is the XP drive then you will have to change that to get VISTA to boot. Sounds like Super Grover has a method to do that easily.

 

[NuxTux]

So from my understanding you want to remove vista and keep XP? I had this same issue before if thats what your talking about. All I did was Formatted the HDD that had vista installed on it if its was partition then formatt the partition. Then I got this program which will replace the MBR with the windows XP MBR. So that screen of the vista MBR went away.

 

[Malam]

From the previous postings, it looks like the easiest path would be to edit the MBR and then reformat the XP drive if I want to keep Vista. Do you have a suggestion for an MBR editor ? I will do a backup this morning and wait for an MBR editor before proceeding .
Thanks guys (and girls?..really? :thumb.