Vista won't boot after removing XP

forrester

Junior Member
Mar 18, 2007
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I have a Seagate 320GB SATA hard drive.

When I had XP Pro, I had three partitions (1 for Windows and 2 for storage/backup). Then when I got Vista, I just used Disk Management to shrink one of the volumes (the second one) and installed Vista using the empty space.

The layout after doing that was like this: Windows XP | Storage Partition | Vista | The other storage partition

Yesterday I decided to remove XP but Vista's disk management wouldn't let me (because it is a system volume). So I booted to the Vista disk, formatted the XP partition, and overwrote the MBR (to remove XP as boot option). And BAM!!! Vista won't start anymore.

According to DISKPART, Vista is a logical volume sitting between the 2 storage partitions; I cannot mark it active, and I cannot make it primary.

If I delete - what used to be the XP partition - and attempt to use all that space for the Vista partition (using extend) it won't let me, saying that it cannot find any free space.

The only thing I can do is create a primary partition using the empty space, however, being empty it is of no use (I cannot boot).

I tried everything I could think of, including installing Linux (SuSE), but the installation won't mount Vista's partition because it doesn't see it as a bootable partition.

Any ideas? I am really frustrated!
 

Pirotech

Senior member
Jul 19, 2005
352
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your mistake is in that you formated your XP partition, i guess its letter is C:. Doesn't matter where(on what partition, logical drive) your os is installed, C: partition would be always a system partition, it means that it contains several dlls and files for example NTLDR.DLL or NTDETECT, they shouldn't be deleted.

i think in your case it's better to reinstall vista on C: drive.