Help with partitions

hello,
I have one hard drive partitioned in two, both have windows vista installed. The two partitions are windows vista home (not working right) and windows vista ultimate (working). My problem is that the vista home partition is set as the active primary partition when i want the vista ultimate partition to be the primary as opposed to a logical partition. i went to change the logical partition to primary and make it active but when i did this it made my computer nonbootable so i changed it back. I can boot into both partitions with no problem and i have managed to set the vista ultimate drive and a primary drive as well but not the active drive. so after all this, i need help making the vista ultimate drive bootable and delete the vista home partition. personally i think the problem is that since windows installed itself on a logical drive it never wrote and mbr to that partition and therefore makes it nonbootable when set as active. so again if someone can help me do 2 things: one- make the vista ultimate the primary active partition. and two- delete the vista home partition. if anyone is unclear about all this then ask me to explain because i know i am not the greatest at wording things.

thanks,

Hello Ari,

After you make the Ultimate partition active, you will just need to do a Startup Repair at boot for it to install the boot mbr for that partition.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html


Once you are able to boot into the Ultimate partition, you should be able to safely delete the Home partition. If the Home partition is to the left of the Ultimate partion instead of the right side of it, then I do not know if you will be able to extend the Ultimate into the deleted Home partition for one drive again without a 3rd partry disk management program or deleting all partitions and doing a clean install of Ultimate.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/95418-disk-management-delete-extend.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Ari said:

hello,
I have one hard drive partitioned in two, both have windows vista installed. The two partitions are windows vista home (not working right) and windows vista ultimate (working). My problem is that the vista home partition is set as the active primary partition when i want the vista ultimate partition to be the primary as opposed to a logical partition. i went to change the logical partition to primary and make it active but when i did this it made my computer nonbootable so i changed it back. I can boot into both partitions with no problem and i have managed to set the vista ultimate drive and a primary drive as well but not the active drive. so after all this, i need help making the vista ultimate drive bootable and delete the vista home partition. personally i think the problem is that since windows installed itself on a logical drive it never wrote and mbr to that partition and therefore makes it nonbootable when set as active. so again if someone can help me do 2 things: one- make the vista ultimate the primary active partition. and two- delete the vista home partition. if anyone is unclear about all this then ask me to explain because i know i am not the greatest at wording things.

thanks,

Click to expand...

One - Make the Vista Ultimate the Primary ....
Start > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management ( On the Side) Select the partition you want to become Primary ( For example C then Right Click it then select Mark Partition as Active.
I think this should work.
Two - Follow the tutorial the way Brink said above to Delete the Partition.

do i need to do this through the home partition or the ultimate partition?

Hi,

When you install any version of Vista, she likes to drop her boot files in the first partition ( this is the one that is on the left in Disk Management ).

The Vista o/s will then install on the partition you selected ( which will only be the same one as the boot files if you selected the first partition ).

Since you want to have only Ultimate installed do a clean install of Ultimate.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/117366-clean-install-full-version-vista.html

During the install you should format both partitions ( in step 11 of the tutorial - if you only want 1 partition delete the second partition - the one listed at the bottom ).

Highlight the first partition ( the top one ) as the partition to install Ultimate. (obviously if you have made it into one, just install on that ).

When the installation is complete, Vista Home will gone, and the partition you have installed Ultimate on will be

C: (System, Boot, Pagefile, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition ).



SIW2

Ari said:

do i need to do this through the home partition or the ultimate partition?

Click to expand...

Ari,

You would need to do this from within Ultimate. However, if you only want one drive partition again and the Home partition is to the left of the Ultimate partition in Disk Management, then you will need to do a clean install of Vista to have one drive again as SIW2 suggested.

If reinstalling, delete both partitions and create a new one with the total size available and format it.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

SIW2 said:

When you install any version of Vista, she likes to drop her boot files in the first partition ( this is the one that is on the left in Disk Management ).

Click to expand...

The Vista installer writes its boot files in whichever one of the primary partitions is marked Active. That's not necessarily the first partition. Any of the primary partitions can be set as Active (some partition managers call it "setting the partition's Boot Flag on").

There's no need to reinstall Vista if you don't want to.

To do what you want, you will need to use a non-Microsoft partition manager such as the freeware gparted which runs from a bootable CD.
GParted -- Download
GParted -- Documentation

The following assumes your Ultimate partition is now a primary partition, not a logical drive in an extended partition.

In gparted, you would first delete the partition containing Vista Home. Then the area it was covering becomes "unallocated space".

If that deleted one was at the start of the disk, you should next move the Ultimate partition to the start of the disk. That way, all the unallocated space will be after it on the disk (right end of the diagram). You need to move it because you can only add space at the end of a partition, not at the start of it.

Then you can resize the Ultimate partition larger so it covers the whole disk, or if you prefer you can use the unallocated space to make a new NTFS partition to store data files.

If you end up keeping more than one partition, do one more thing while you are still in gparted: Right click the Ultimate partition > Manage Flags > set this partition's boot flag on (which makes it the Active partition).
Then quit from gparted and reboot.

Vista Ultimate probably won't boot from the hard disk after having its partition moved, so boot the Vista DVD and run its boot repair.
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html

Hi Oldbloke

In trying to keep it short I over simplified that bit - however you will see from the OP

My problem is that the vista home partition is set as the active primary partition when i want the vista ultimate partition to be the primary as opposed to a logical partition.

Click to expand...

which indicates to me that his first partition is the active primary one where he installed Vista Home, and his second partition is a logical drive
where he installed Vista Ultimate o/s.

Your suggestion of using Linux GParted is an interesting one - there is a tutorial for anyone interested

Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista Partition :: the How-To Geek

Unfortunately, as you say

The following assumes your Ultimate partition is now a primary partition, not a logical drive in an extended partition.

Click to expand...

It doesn't seem to be the best way forward in this case.

It also seems to me the clean reinstall method would be more straightforward.


Thanks

SIW2

The confusion is caused by the using words wrongly.
"Primary" does not necessarily mean "the boot partition". "Logical drive" does not mean "every partition which is not the one to get booted".

Primary Partition just means "the normal simple type of partition".

One hard disk can have up to four Primary Partitions. That's because the main partition table has enough room in it for up to four items. Any one of those primary partitions can be set Active in the partition table.

When you switch on the computer, the BIOS finds the boot hard disk and starts the code at the start of that disk's first sector (the MBR). The boot code there reads the partition table to see which partition is currently set as the Active one and boots it, i.e. starts the code at the beginning of its first sector.

If you need more than four partitions, you can make one of the four slots in the partition table be for an Extended Partition. An extended partition can contain many Logical Drives. That's a way of getting around the limit of only having 4 items in a standard partition table.

If you use that method, with up to 3 primaries plus one extended partition containing a few logical drives, the standard MBR code can't boot one of the logical drives directly, because only a primary partition can be set active.

If Ari was able to set his Ultimate partition as active, it must be a Primary partition type, just like his Home partition is. It didn't boot successfully just because it doesn't have the right code at its start - because Vista put its boot code and boot files on the other primary partition. That can be fixed by using the Vista DVD's boot repair, after setting Ultimate's partition active. That always writes boot code onto whichever partition is currently set active, because that's the one which will be booted.

The XP installer and Vista installer do the same as the boot repairer:
It reads the partition table to see which of the primary partitions is currently set active, then writes boot code onto it (some code without a file name in its first sector and also some named boot files).
If you tell the Vista installer to put Windows on another partition, instead of the active one, it makes the boot files on the Active partition point to your Windows partition (which in Vista's case may even be a logical drive). That's how you can install Vista onto a logical drive - by booting it via a primary partition.

It's very easy to resize and rearrange your partitions if they are all the primary type and slightly more complicated to rearrange things if you also have some logical drives inside an extended partition. That's why I said my step-by-step guide above only applies if both his partitions are the primary type.

Thanks Oldbloke,

I missed that bit

change the logical partition to primary and make it active but when i did this

Click to expand...

so he does have the option of using your Gparted method as above

Cheers

SIW2