[SOLVED] Move Windows 7 System Partition

Hi (I'm new here), I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and am having a bit of an issue in Windows Disk Management:

I used to use Windows XP (skipped Vista entirely), and had it installed on my C:\ drive. I bought a new drive, D:\, for Windows 7. I installed Windows 7 on D:\, and left XP on C:\, but when I open Disk Management in Windows 7, it says that Local Disk (C is the System partition, not D, even though I'm not on XP while checking it. And when I load My Computer (Well, it's just Computer now, I guess; I renamed it to My Computer for ease of familiarity), my D:\ drive has the little blue bar & Windows logo on the HDD icon, while the C:\ drive is just a picture of a HDD.

I am looking for a way to switch the "System" bit over to my D:\ drive partition (I only have two HDDs, and only one partition per HDD) from my C:\ drive, but the option is not available. My reason for doing this is that I want to reformat/erase XP off of my C:\ drive since I no longer use it, and perhaps install Linux on it or just use it for internal storage.

However, when I got Windows 7 Ultimate x64 from the Download Center, I didn't burn it to a disk, but rather mounted it to a Virtual Drive on XP (which is my C:\ drive), and chose to install Windows 7 to my D:\ drive.

Did installing it this way put the so-called 100 or 200MB Windows 7 recovery/boot/whatever partition I've heard about onto my C:\ drive, and thus make it impossible/dangerous to just reformat my C:\ drive? In other words, since reformatting my Windows 7 HDD isn't a viable option for me, am I stuck?

Hello and welcome Haplo!

If you can't see the 200mb partition then it won't exist, which is good news. If you're unsure you can post a screenshot of the disk management console, just so we can see the layout of the drives in case there is a WinRE partition there.

I've not actually tried what you are doing for quite some time, but I would assume you can just format your 1st drive (although I would just disable it in the BIOS for now, as this will have the same effect) and then your PC will try to boot from the current D: which will no doubt fail, meaning you will need to boot from the Windows 7 DVD and perform a startup repair which should re-create the boot files. Once that works, you can then enable the other drive and format it. Perhaps someone else who has done this recently could confirm if it works.

Thanks, I'll try disabling C:\ in BIOS and get back here with the results.

Try to burn the W7 image to a DVD if you can, as you can use the startup repair tool on that to re-create the boot file you will need

Hi Haplo - Welcome to w7forums

Once you do as Ian suggest and the computer doesn't boot you can use the link below for repairing your boot files.

I would mark D: as the active partition and completely remove the XP drive before using the Recovery Disk. This will ensure that the Recovery Disk are not setting up a dual boot that you will later need to be correct when removing XP.

Download Windows 7 System Recovery Discs

Alright. So I restarted my computer, and opened up the BIOS. I couldn't find an option that resembled "turning off" a HDD, except for "seek other boot drives" which I set to "disabled". When I did this, and also when I changed the HDD priority from my old XP drive being first to my new 7 drive being first, I get a load error titled:

NTLDR is missing
Press ctrl+alt+del to restart

I am currently searching around the web to try to find ways of fixing this easily, but please feel free to elaborate on it if you guys are familiar with that error.

http://www.w7forums.com/download-windows-7-system-recovery-discs-t2049.html

Oops, bit of a double post. Please Delete

Completely detaching the XP HDD and booting from the repair CD worked! Thanks guys!