Two installs of windows on two drives

[jDSX]

I had a old windows 10 install on my seagate hdd when I first bought it, then as I updated my system (new psu, ram) I bought a ssd and installed windows 7 to it and now I use windows 7 on ssd as my primary boot drive but I want to get rid of the windows 10 install on my seagate hdd because it's taking up space and not being used since I install my games to it.

How do I remove the windows 10 install without it messing up the boot sequence? I heard if I did it would say the bootmgr is missing since I have UEFI bios, not entirely sure any help would be appreciated

 

[jDSX]

bump any help would be great

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Simply formatting the drive shouldn't mess anything up, as you installed Windows 7 on a separate drive which should have it's own bootloader.

When you boot, are you taken to the Windows 10 boot loader (it'll be the all blue screen where it might list "launch Windows 10" and then "Launch an older version of Windows" or something of the sort), or is it the old Windows boot loader (the black screen that will list Windows 7 and Windows 10 and whatever other options)?

If it's the blue screen, you're likely not booting directly from the SSD, but from the HDD still. Change your boot priority to the SSD in your BIOS menu, and see if that changes to the old Windows Boot loader.

If it's the black screen, then you can just format the drive and it will work fine.

If you're still unsure, grab a CD and burn a Windows 7 repair disc to it so you can access cmd prompt and fix the bootmgr manually. But it should work just fine.

 

[jDSX]

Simply formatting the drive shouldn't mess anything up, as you installed Windows 7 on a separate drive which should have it's own bootloader.

When you boot, are you taken to the Windows 10 boot loader (it'll be the all blue screen where it might list "launch Windows 10" and then "Launch an older version of Windows" or something of the sort), or is it the old Windows boot loader (the black screen that will list Windows 7 and Windows 10 and whatever other options)?

If it's the blue screen, you're likely not booting directly from the SSD, but from the HDD still. Change your boot priority to the SSD in your BIOS menu, and see if that changes to the old Windows Boot loader.

If it's the black screen, then you can just format the drive and it will work fine.

If you're still unsure, grab a CD and burn a Windows 7 repair disc to it so you can access cmd prompt and fix the bootmgr manually. But it should work just fine.

@Tom Bombadildo It's the old windows boot loader as you mentioned well I don't know how but now I cannot boot into windows because it says a change has happen in the boot device how do i repair the bootmgr to change the active partiton on both drives??

File: \Boot\BCD
Status code: 0xc000000f

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Assuming you have the repair/windows 7 install disc do the following to check for the active boot partition:

Open cmd prompt, and type in "diskpart"
list disk
select the disc that would be your SSD/Windows 7 install with "select diskXYZ"
list partition
select the boot partition for Windows 7 (it should be a little 100-200mb partition) with "select partitionXYZ"
Then type "detail partition", this will show you if it's active. If it's not, type active, then reboot and it should work.

If not, boot into the repair/install disc and open cmd prompt again, and type the following:

bootrec /fixmbr 
bootrec /fixboot 
bootrec /scanos 
bootrec /rebuildbcd

Should fix the issue.

 

[jDSX]

It's saying

"Successfully scanned windows installation
total identify windows installations: 0


WTF where did the windows install go

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

I got it back thank you!!!! @Tom Bombadildo