Booting from non-system drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter J Englund
  • Start date Start date
J

J Englund

I had to do a clean install because my original upgrade install revealed
that my boot drive was bad (after the install succeeded and I ran Vista). I
bought a new hard drive, replaced my boot drive, and did the install.
Everything went find except for one little thing...

I now have a problem that seems to stem from the fact that I didn't change
the BIOS settings to specify the new drive as my boot drive before
installing, so that one of my other drives inherited that status. My
situation is now, according to Computer Management:
C-drive = Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
D-drive = Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Also, the Boot Manager is still active. I guess this is what allows me to
boot from the D-drive in spite of it's not being the System drive.

Does anyone know a way in which I can correct this (move the Boot, Page
File, Crash Dump properties to my C-drive and get rid of the Boot Manager)
without re-installing Vista again, this time with the BIOS settings
corrected?

Thanks in advance,
John
 
Try disconnecting the D: drive, then boot from the Vista DVD and do a
"Repair." That should fix the boot problem. When you re-connect the D:
drive, then delete the boot folder.

It worked for me.

--

______________________________

Walter B
waltblanch[at]tampabay[dot]rr[dot]com
______________________________
 
Hello,
careful here you may have the drive designators reversed.
C-drive = Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
This is the drive that contains the boot files as well as the bootmanager.

D-drive = Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
This is the drive that contains Windows.

the terminology in the NT based world has always refered to the drives this
way.
It is confusing.

Thanks,
Darrell Gorter[MSFT]

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
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|>NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:15:51 -0600
|>Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup
|>Subject: Re: Booting from non-system drive
|>From: "J Englund" <[email protected]>
|>Reply-to: (e-mail address removed)
|>References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
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|>Thanks very much for your quick reply! I'll try it this weekend.
|>
|>-John-
|>
 
I appreciate the warning, Darrell. I checked, though, and the C-drive
really does contain Windows, while the D-drive has the hidden system
directory Boot. In any case, I can distinguish between the two drives (old
and new) physically, since they're different brands.

Thanks,
-John-
 
Hi again Walter,

I attempted your fix, and got as far as the Repair, where a System Recovery
Options dialog box came up with no Operating System entry in the list box.
It also had a Load Driver button which, when clicked, led me to the Sources
directory on the installation DVD. Does any of this ring a bell from your
own experience, and do you have any advice on how to proceed? (By the way,
my drives are SATA drives, if that makes any difference.)

Thanks,
-John-
 
In case anyone else is interested, I did finally succeed, and it was pretty
easy. All I had to do was to copy the Boot directory and the bootmgr file
directly from the Vista DVD onto my C-drive, then follow Walter's advice.
It didn't matter that the "Select Operating System" dialog box was empty
during the Repair process. I just clicked Next and selected Startup Repair,
and that did the trick.
 
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