Active/Inactive Partition help

[Aitrus]

The story, I installed Win7, and the install automatically created a dual boot system. I wanted to free up the space on the old WinXP partition, so I activated the Win7 partition and tried to format. Wouldn't let me. The disk manager in Windows 7 wouldn't let me inactive the XP partition (on a separate physical drive) so I used eh.... the command prompt and the DISK something to deactivate it. I then restarted and realized my... I mean "my friend's" advice had caused my computer to no longer boot. I get the 'select proper boot device or insert boot media' error. A technical friend of mine that I trust advised me to reinstall XP, but didn't clarify if I was able to activate the Win7 partition so I wouldn't have to reinstall that as well! Or other ways.. I'm not sure... Ideas anyone, if so, how do I go about doing them... My end desire is my previous install of Win7, or if absolutely necessary I'll backup all my data and reinstall Windows 7 I recently purchased. Thank you thank you in advance.

UPDATE ADVICE: When you install Windows 7 on a secondary partition/drive, it puts files on the main partition/drive that are required in order to boot Windows 7 properly. When you deactivated that primary partition, you made those files unavailable to the boot process. To fix this, leave the old drive inactive (or remove it) and run a repair installation of Windows 7 on the computer.

Should I backup all my data on the Win7 partition or is it pretty safe? Also, should I worry about which port the sata cable is plugged in to? Right now it's in 5 or 6 I believe.. does that matter? The previous install was from a backup Win7 disk I got from a friend to test it out. I've recently purchased the sofware, does it make a difference using the New Purchased disk on an install that was from a different disk? Thank again in advance!

 

[RebateMonger]

The SATA port number makes no difference as long as the BIOS is told to try booting from the correct disk. If you have a disk that's listed in the BIOS boot order and if you have an Active partition on that disk, then the PC should attempt to boot from the Active partition on that disk.

 

[Aitrus]

Any ideas about backing up first? I have a lot of stuff, semi important but not life changing, so if it's "pretty safe" I'll go ahead and just try it...

UPDATE AGAIN: Ran the repair after booting from the win7 disk. It found a startup error, so I chose to fix and reboot. Now I'm getting another error: NTLDR is missing, Control + Alt + Delete to reboot. I'll try the repair again maybe? Now what? 🙁 Again, thank you thank you in advance.

 

[Aitrus]

No one?

 

[ViRGE]

I don't suppose you've tried to run startup repair again to see what it does?

 

[NoQuarter]

Any ideas about backing up first? I have a lot of stuff, semi important but not life changing, so if it's "pretty safe" I'll go ahead and just try it...

UPDATE AGAIN: Ran the repair after booting from the win7 disk. It found a startup error, so I chose to fix and reboot. Now I'm getting another error: NTLDR is missing, Control + Alt + Delete to reboot. I'll try the repair again maybe? Now what? 🙁 Again, thank you thank you in advance.

You should try running the repair with the XP drive disconnected from the system so it can't try placing the boot files there.

Otherwise try something like these instructions for getting the drive bootable:
http://www.heiser.net/posts/3256

Or google 'repair bootloader' or 'rebuild bcd'. If you do end up needing to reinstall Win7 you won't lose any data. Everytime you install over the older installs it renames the old folders so you never lose any data, you just have to dig around for it.