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This is a very common issue when willing to switch from a temporary Dual Boot (for a test/data transfer phase) to a unique OS Boot (i.e. the most recent one)

I had windows XP on and IDE HDD, "Disk 1". I then installed windodws 7 on a SATA HDD, "Disk 2".
Dual Boot worked for a while, then I started having a disk-read error while booting, and when I succeeded in booting and chose Windows 7, "Disk 1" was often marked unallocated. (probably an IDE/SATA Conflict involving AHCI)

All in all, as I do not need the XP System anymore, what I would like is to definitely get rid of "Disk1", but I assume boot info is on it. Is there a way of moving boot info from "Disk 1" to "Disk 2" or any other way to make the system boot the current Windows 7 without the need of Disk1 (Building a BCD from scratch on "Disk 2") ?

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2 Answers 2

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I Found a convenient solution here :

It is possible to move the boot files, without having to reconfigure anything.

Copy bootmgr to the 7 drive. Then copy the boot folder to the 7 drive, ignoring the warning that it can't copy bcd and bcd.log. Just tell it to skip them.

Then do from elevated command prompt:

bcdedit /export X:\boot\bcd

where X is your 7 drive.

Change bios to boot from 7 drive and you should be good to go.

Also, your Win 7 partition should be set as active.

However, for some reason, this did not work properly (Impossible to boot) I may have missed something.

So I decided to use EASYBCD

enter image description here enter image description here

It perfectly did the trick. Now I could get rid of the XP disk, as all boot info is contained in the Windows 7 Disk.

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This is a good article on how you can move the boot manager to the proper drive: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=324. One thing I have seen on some of my systems is some card reader hardware that maps as drive letters seems to get confused about drivers, you will see this device manager as device showing not working, simply uninstall device in device and reboot.

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  • Or you can change the drive-letter in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc).
    – Synetech
    May 25, 2011 at 13:37
  • the article perfectly meets the issue, but it involves using a third party software (BootIt BM). There must be a do-it-yourself solution.
    – Mehdi LAMRANI
    May 25, 2011 at 14:40
  • At the very bottom of the article it describes how to do this with the Win7 disk, also see this: terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409 The goal is to get all the boot info over to your w7 partition then update the boot sector, bdcedit is part of w7.
    – jtreser
    May 27, 2011 at 13:04

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