Windows Vista Removing Windows Boot Manager, No Vista HD

Hello,

I've had some problems with the hard drive I installed Vista on...But long story short, I now have a fried hard drive (not my XP HD)...Anyways, I can't really see any way to remove the Boot Manager...Would anyone know of any way to do this?

Thanks

 

You need to reinstate the XP partition boot record (PBR) so it again targets the XP boot files instead of the Vista ones. You can then delete the Vista components if you want.

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The only action essential to remove Vista and restore the original boot sequence is to reinstate the previous PBR of the active partition. With XP/2K this is running one simple command from the Recovery Console "“ fixboot. Once you have done this and the machine is booting as before with no Vista boot menu you can safely delete the Vista OS and its boot files.

The four Vista files in the root of the original OS will cause no problems if left in place, but can be deleted if desired. They are:- Boot.BAK - BOOTSEC.BAK - bootmgr and boot (a folder). Don’t of course confuse these with the original boot.ini file of XP/2K and accidentally delete this as well. Vista will have added a couple of lines of text to the start of the boot.ini file just to inform users that editing it will not affect how bootmgr operates. These can be deleted if you know what you are doing.

The Vista MBR will happily boot XP/2K with no problems and does not need to be replaced for Windows sake. However, many current disk manipulation apps for partitioning, imaging, backup etc are unlikely to be fully compatible yet with this MBR, so probably advisable to restore the original. Again one command from the 2K/XP Recovery Console will do the job "“ fixmbr.

 

Thanks very much for your help...fixboot worked perfectly.