Change bootable System Partition

[maharjun]

I have 2 Major Partions. one has Win XP(Partition 0) installed. and the other has Win 7 starter(partition 1 i think)

Now, i intend to format the partion containing Win XP and extend the Win 7 partition to include the win XP partition. however, in Disk Management,i get the following

HP_PAVILLION (the one having Windows XP) (System, Active, Primary Partition)
Win7 (Boot,PageFile, CrashDump, Primary Partition)

This obviously implies that i cant format/delete HP_PAVILLION

I cant seem to make Win7 Active because then my boot fails with the message

NTLDR is Missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

Why isnt there a System Tag in my Win7 Drive.

Howdo i make the Comp boot successfully from Win7 (After having set it as Active)?

And finally, If the Above 2 are done, will i be able to perform my partition delete and extend?

[JorgeM]

The files required to boot a Windows 7 operating system are not required to be on the same partition. Sounds like you at some point installed Win 7 after the fact. As you can see, you just blew away the partook that had your boot files

This is one of the main reasons why I discourage multi-boot configurations. You can try a repair, but your quickest recovery is going to be to first connect this drive to another of to get you data off, then next wipe the drive, create the partitions, and reinstall. This is just my opinion and recommendation.

Once you recover, you should consider virtualization as a better choice for hosting multiple OSs on one computer.

[rubberman]

I tend to agree with JorgeM. At least, that's what I recommend to people who want to run more than one OS on a system. Actually, if you want, you can install a small Linux image on the disc, and it's boot loader will happily handle multiple Windows systems, even if (I think) they are installed on an extended partition, which Windows' bootloaders don't allow.

[maharjun]

Im Sorry, I could not understand your posts. but i have managed to fix the issue.

just for clarification, I was sure that both partitions had their respective boot files in place just that when forced to boot from win7, the error message came
NTLDR missing

if i changed it back to HP_PAVILLION, everything would work fine.

So, a little research showed that The Boot sector of my old PC was configured to look for an NTLDR file in whichever partition it was supposed to be booting from. However, the Windows 7 Bootup is not through NTLDR but through BOOTMGR. So, this was never recognised by my PC and hence the error.

This was fixed by a neet little command line tool called BootSect.exe. Using this i edited my bootsector so thsat it would search for BOOTMGR instead of NTLDR while booting from Win7, and Voila, everything worked. Win 7 got the status of 'System' Partition and i was able to delete HP_PAVILLION and extend Win7.

[johhny-marshal]

You need to format and delete both the partitions and make a new partition with the total acquired space.

[maharjun]

No Not really, It is very easy to Extend an existing Partition to Unallocated Area(Deleted partition) to the right of it go to Computer Management-Disk Management.

Now in order to extend to the left, one can use the extremely simple but powerful software Partition-Magic