3 hard drives, 3 Operating Systems..need help

Hi,

I did a clean install of Windows 7 Home premium on a new hard drive. Previously, I had 2 hard drives and ran a dual boot, one XP and the other Vista. After Win 7 install, my machine originally gave me the option to boot into ony one of the three. After a few re-boots, it started skipping the splash screen and would automaitlcally got to Win 7 (I have no issues with this).

Now that I like Win 7 and everything is running fine, I want to format my other two drives. Problem is that my system won't let me format the drive with Vista on it as it seems to be using some system files or something. I've tried it from my computer, disc management and command prompt with no luck.

I removed the boot sequence from msconfig so only Win 7 is there and I used EasyBCD as another way of trying. Still can't format the Vista drive.

All I want is my computer running Win 7 only and use my older drives as backup drives.

any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi,

Go to Disk Management and make sure the 7 partition is marked Active - if not, rt click and select Mark as active.

In bios, set the Disk containing the 7 partition as first HD in Bios boot order.

Boot the 7 dvd - when you get to screen saying Install Now - don't click that.

Click where it says - "Repair my Computer" at the bottom of the screen . Run startup repair 3 times.

That's it.

Ok, disc management has my Win 7 drive listed as active as well as my Vista drive. My bios is set to run off the Win 7 drive.

I logged into Win 7, put the disc in and got to the screen that says "install now". There is no "repair my computer" on that screen. At the bottom, all it says is "what to know before installing windows 7"

Tried booting from CD but it went right into Windows ()although it did configure a temporary desktop for me since I booted off the disc.

I'm usually very good witht his stuff so I am quite baffled as to what I am doing wrong!

You have to boot the dvd to get that option .

That is because it runs loads into RAM and runs from there.

Probably easiest to use the pop up boot menu - if you have that option .

When you start the pc - on the POST screen do you something like

F2 for setup

F11 for bootmenu

If so - press whatever key it tells you for boot menu - arrow down to cdrom drive - put the dvd in and press enter.

It will ask again - "press any key to boot from cdrom drive" -press enter again.

You get windows loading files - select language and keyboard - Next - Install now , at the bottom is Repair My Computer.

If you don't have the bootmenu option - you need to go into bios and set cdrom first in Bios boot order.

LOL!! I am doing something wrong here. Ok, easily went into my BIOS and changed my HD boot order to my Win 7 drive (I thought I had already doen this but had not). FDrom here, I had no issues with the install disc booting into the setup mode and finding the repair section. I ran it three times as suggested and I kept rebooting WITH the disk in but it kept going to the same install screens (i.e. it never booted to Windows while using the disc after changing the order of the HD boots).

When I removed the disc and tried to boot from the HD (the Win 7), I get an erro message that it can't find the BOOTMGR file (or something like that).

I ended up going back into my BIOS, changing the order back to my VISTA drive first and now I can at least get back into my Windows 7 drive.

I am clearly missing a stepo somewhere but the repair thing did not seem to address the issue yet. It would seem that the BOOT file required must reside on my Vista drive and it never got copied over to the Win 7 drive either during the original install or during the repair.

What are my next steps?

By the way, thanks for your help so far.