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General discussion

HUGE PROBLEM! Please Help

Oct 20, 2007 2:12AM PDT

I have a dual boot system of XP Pro and Vista Ult. The problem is that I have my drives partitioned as C and T. C: is XP, and T: is Vista. I went to http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp to get all my instructions on how to do this. And I am trying to remove XP right now. But since XP is on C: and Vista is on T:, it will not let me delete either of the volumes. Am I doomed for another Vista re-installation?

Any help would be awesome!

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Never done this with Vista.
Oct 20, 2007 2:55AM PDT

And it's likely to fail. Copy your drive and try what we did for dual boot Win98+XP systems. We would use a partition editor like Partition Magic to delete the one we want gone then resize the partitions etc. GPARTED is a possible replacement. Now that we have it gone we are in for a REPAIR INSTALL of the OS then reinstalling software that wanted drive T...

Bob

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so let me see
Oct 20, 2007 4:51AM PDT

if i understand correctly. Delete drive C using Partition Magic 8(which I have) then give the C: drive to the T: drive so the T: drive has the full 80GB Harddrive. Then do a repair install using my Vista DVD and make sure it is installing on the C: drive....? Reinstalling my software would then go to Drive C:

Did i get that all right??

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bad news
Oct 20, 2007 4:58AM PDT

alright, well installing of PM8 went well. but then my C: and T: do not even show up. it says my 80GB is a BAD sector and cannot find any partitions at all. All it shows is my 750GB Ext drive and my 12GB Flash drive. Am I doomed for a reinstall now?

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Did you try GPARTED?
Oct 20, 2007 5:04AM PDT

It appears PM is not the tool for this one. Strange but not unheard of as machines have moved to SATA...

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well
Oct 21, 2007 12:37PM PDT

i got gparted live cd and ran it, but somewhere along the line my OS became unbootable. So i put in a linux live cd, transfered all my docs to my ext drive and reinstalled vista. no harm done, i was not too settled into that install of vista yet anyway. Thanks Bob for all your help.

-tylersmiller

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Just so you know...
Oct 22, 2007 4:46AM PDT

After use of gparted or PM I expected the OS to fail to boot. This is why I noted the Vista Repair install research as well as the backup system.

Bob

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(NT) i did try the repair install, but did not work
Oct 22, 2007 7:04AM PDT