Windows 7 With Windows t upgrade activated can I remove the old Vista?

[peppy197]

I have activated my Windows 7 which is on a separate disk drive from the old predecessor, Vista 64.
Can I remove this older disk and repair the boot using the upgrade DVD? Do you need a full retail version to do that?
Do I have to keep the Hard Drive that the old Vista was on forever ?(~~)

And, can I use that Vista on another computer?

 

[TorrentG]

Yes, there are better ways to do that but running a startup repair (up to 3x may be necessary) from the DVD while the original hdd is removed will fix the booting.

Make sure there aren't any USB sticks or USB hard drives attached while doing so and also make sure bios is set to boot from the new drive.

 

[peppy197]

Yes, there are better ways to do that......

What are the better ways?

 

[TorrentG]

It involves a manual process of copying the boot folder and bootmgr files from the root of the old drive to the root of the new drive.

When it says that it can't copy over bcd or bcd.log to the new drive, tell it to skip them.

Then open an elevated command prompt and run the following command:

bcdedit /export X:\boot\bcd

(Make sure you change X to the real drive letter for the new drive on your pc instead.)

Check the new boot folder for bcd to be in it now. Open disk management and set the partition where you just copied over to on the new drive, to be the one set as active if it is already not.

Reboot to bios and change it so it boots to the new hard drive instead of old. Save.

Boot to Windows and use msconfig to remove the old entry to Vista. You can also power off and remove the Vista drive too.