As most of you know I was dualbooting XP and Vista. Some of you know I even went straight Vista. What most do not know what all the issues I ran into removing the XP from my system with the Vista on there. Used to when you dualbooted XP with any lesser OS like Win2K or Win98 the boot loader was written into XP's boot section. So technically all you had to do was remove/delete the lower OS and remove that OS's entry from the boot.ini for XP to move up. This is not the case when dualbooting any OS with Vista. Vista's bootloader is written into the older OS's boot section. I found this out the hard way. When I formatted the drive with XP on it I was unable to boot into just the Vista. The repair section on the Vista disk proved to be useless to repair it because it was looking for the boot file in the XP which had been deleted. What I tried next was somewhat genius I remember thinking.
Until I did it. I dualbooted Vista with Vista trying to just try to get into my already established and good running setup of Vista.
At this time please keep in mind Window's EULA states "only one copy is valid", so instantly as I booted into the old established setup I get this notification that this copy of Windows Vista is not a Genuine Windows Product and will be reduced to lower functionality only allowing me to boot to Internet Explorer and redirecting to Window's site where I am offered a kit for $191 to validate this copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. Anyway to shorten this story up I ended up completely reformatting both drives and then installing a fresh setup of Vista and going from there. Hopefully my little tale can save others the time and trouble. Good day.
