XP going away. How to get Vista to boot properly?

[Snooper]

Lets see if I can explain this correctly. Like most of you, I have been using XP pretty much since the say it came out (well, earlier actually!). Last year, I installed Vista 64 Ultimate on a different drive and set it up as a dual boot system so I could play with Vista. Needless to say, that has worked perfectly for me all this time.

The other day, I realized that it had been over 3 months since I had booted up XP. And, I couldn't think of anything on that drive that I needed or wanted either. I have been giving some thought to redoing some of my drives and configurations, so I thought this would be a great time to clean out the old XP install.

My system is a bit more complex than most in that I have 5 Seagate ES drives in a RAID 5 as Disk0. That raid is broken up into four partitions, the first one of which XP is installed in (It was a test on my part that actually worked out pretty good). The raid is running off the P5B Deluxe MB and hasn't given me any issues at all. Vista is running on it's separate Seagate ES drive as Disk1, and it has the whole drive to itself.

My plan is to pick up a RAID card (Areca ARC-1220) for a couple of reasons: 1) So I can see just how much better performance I get with a hardware RAID and 2) So I can add more drives to the RAID for more capacity (out of SATA connectors that support RAID on the P5B). I can use my 1TB eSATA drive to back everything in the RAID up, so rebuilding the array won't be THAT painful for me.

Once the XP partition is gone, I won't have a proper boot configuration anymore. Even though Vista is on it's own disk, it won't be able to boot as there won't be anything there to tell it TO boot.

So the real question is this: What is the best way to create a boot configuration for this drive? Will I just have to reinstall onto the drive so the Vista installer can create it for me? Is there someway to use the repair installation to rebuild a boot configuration?

Also, I'm not sure this will be an issue or not, but my Vista install is SP1 and fully patched, but the media I currently have is not SP1. Anywhere to get a legit SP1 image, or should I just roll my own with my DVD and the assorted SP1 and patches?

Thanks for the help!

 

[ViRGE]

Nuking XP should have no effect on your Vista installation or being able to boot it up. Boot info is stored in the MBR (which in turn points to the Vista bootloader) which is separate from the partition XP is on.

Once you replace the RAID array, your worst case scenario is that your system boots off of your RAID array, and as such the MBR it looks for is on there. If that's the case, it's very easy to boot off of the Vista intallation DVD and have Vista fix that.

 

[Snooper]

Thanks. I thought I should be able to use the install CDs to recreate the MBR, but I haven't had to do it before, so... The current MBR is on the current array, but that array will be totally rebuilt when I install the RAID card and the XP partition will go away at that point, so there won't be any existing MBR to point to the Vista disk. But it sounds like there won't be any issues (ok, too many issues!) in recovering the Vista installation.