I read William Wilson’s Tips & Tricks back in April on removing XP from a dual-boot XP/Vista situation. I thought my problems were solved until learning that my Dell warranty would be void if they found that I was not using original XP Pro that was shipped with my XPS400 last year. Since my 2 operating systems are on 2 separate SATA II drives I would like to break the dual-boot and unplug the XP Pro drive, leaving Vista as my only operating system but have the capability of reversing the plugs (also the BIOS) , making XP Pro the sole drive if I need to contact Dell support for any major problems. This means restoring the original boot configuration for that drive which unfortunately, I don’t know how to do.
I have looked on the XP disk (disk0) and found the following files: Boot.Bak, Boot.ini.saved, BOOTSECT.BAK, as well as boot.ini, boot.mgr, NTDETECT.com and ntldr. I should be able to reconfigure my Vista Ultimate disk using William Wilson’s instructions. At least I hope so, but I would sure appreciate some help and advice on how to reconfigure the XP Pro drive to boot as the only drive.
Since posting the above I have discovered that I have a complete disk image of the C: or XP Pro drive made with Acronis True Image 10 prior to the dual boot so it does not matter if this drive is corrupted or formatted in disabling the dual boot. Unfortunately I have also found out that I cannot format the C: drive from Vista as I had planned. I guess that is because it is the “system drive”. Does anyone know if moving the Vista drive which is now connected to the Sata2 position to the Sata0 and move the XP C: drive to the Sata2 position would be of any help? The Vista drive shows as the G drive in my computer but as either C or D in the dual boot configuration. Unfortunately my BIOS doesn’t allow changing the boot order of the Sata drives. Perhaps someone has another way to format the C drive. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Problem solved:
Switching the Vista drive from Sata2 to Sata0 was the answer. Once I did that (without connecting the XP drive) I could use the Vista dvd as described by William Wilson above. Then it was a simple matter of connecting the XP drive to Sata2 and formating it using Vista. Many thanks to the 140+ viewers who took the time to read this long post.