Vista - A new MBR and boot sector on Vista boot drive

I've got a system that has XP on an IDE disk (the primary boot drive), and
I've got a copy of Vista on my SATA second drive. I was double-booting so
that I could experiment with Vista to see if I was ready to move to it, but
my time has run out.

Suddenly the IDE drive with XP on it has started to fail, not quite
catastrophically but enough so that I can't boot into the XP partition, and
I'm moving my operation over onto the Vista partition. And I'm going to have
to remove the failing IDE drive and replace it with a new one.

Unfortunately the master boot record is on the failing IDE drive. I've been
looking around on the web for repair tools and it looks like the Recovery
Environment that you can get to by booting from the installation DVD will do
the job, but can anyone give me a cookbook approach to getting this fixed? I
don't know what I need to do about a boot sector, whether just repairing the
MBR is all I have to do, and so on and so forth.

Thanks for any help,
Tom Dacon

do you have a full version of windows on cd? if so, i would remove the ide drive, set up the sata as master (which should be automatic), do a clean install of windows, then install the ide drive as slave . then you can copy any files you need. and you should see a significant performance boost with the sata as primary drive.

Thanks, kword -

I've already copied off all the data from the failing drive that I can, and
while I do have the CD that I installed Vista from I'd just as soon save
myself the trouble of reinstalling the OS if I can fix up the SATA drive so
that it'll boot without the IDE drive present. It's supposed to be not too
tough if I can find someone else who's fought that gunfight before and can
tell me just what I have to do.

Tom


"kword88" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:73294de6a7ebb64e2de84b72db8fc63e@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 22:10:11 -0800, "Tom Dacon"
<tdacon@xxxxxx> wrote:
Changing boot drive
<http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.vista.general/browse_thread/thread/b7b5f701391f6a4c/2489c03e0a2cb83d?hl=en&lnk=st&q=#2489c03e0a2cb83d>

"andy" <bogusaddress@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:re30r4pfr4b027ktihq741uiq94uo5epqd@xxxxxxThanks, Andy! That looks like just what I'm after.

Tom