My desktop has a 500gb internal drive. I had it dual-booting XP and Win 7. I was finally done migrating files and such, so I wanted to remove the XP partition (which was first on the drive) and expand the 7 partition to the full drive. I'd adjusted the sizes of the partitions before and it was no big deal - use gparted to adjust, then use the repair startup on the Win 7 DVD to fix the bootloader (since the position of the Win7 partition had changed). I figured this would be the same, so I plunged in.

Boot off gparted, have it delete the XP partition and expand the 7 partition. Reboot, and it won't boot (just like I expected). So then I boot off the 7 install DVD, pick repair computer, then fix startup problems. It says it fixed it, so I reboot. Nothing. Just a blinking cursor on the black screen. Repeat the repair process until it says there's no more errors, but still won't boot. Time to get out the laptop and google it.

Find this site: http://heiser.net/posts/3256 I follow his instructions. Still won't boot. Repair repeatedly, still won't boot. He's got a link on there to another method. I try that. Still nothing. Finally decide it's time to cave and try just installing 7 over itself (some people said that fixes it). So I do, and it still will NOT boot.

Plan C. Wipe the drive completely and boot off my Windows Home Server recovery disc. That finds the server and lets me pick which backup to restore. I choose the latest Win7 image and away it goes. Says it'll be 1 hour 11 minutes, so I go to bed (it's after 11pm now).

Get up this morning and the screen says it restored correctly. So I reboot. Still nothing. Boot off the win7 disc again and go through the bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot, bootrec/rebuildbcd cycle again. Reboot, and this time I actually get an error message! I'm making progress! Do the repair utility on the DVD twice more and then I'm greeted by the wonderful Win7 load screen. Never thought I'd be so happy to see that.

Moral of the story: setting up a dual boot machine is easy. Removing the first boot partition, that can be hard and painful. Next time I'll just install a second drive.

Congrats on getting it fixed!

I'm trying to think how I would do it, and maybe you could answer this for me. Does WHS show both partitions as separate computers? Or at least will they back up separately?

If so, I think that I would have backed both up and then blown away the C: drive completely. Then reinstalled the Win7 image from WHS. I think that might have worked, and that's how I have moved a RAID system onto a non-raid disk.

But IIRC, does WHS support Win7 until Power Pack 3 comes out? For some reason I thought it didn't.

Yes, my WHS shows both partitions as separate computers. If I needed to, I can access anything that was on my XP partition from the wHS backups until I delete them (or they auto-delete after so many weeks/months, I forget what retention I have set).

Knowing what I do now, I definitely would have done as you say. Based on my previous adjusting the partitions on this same machine, I expected it to work easier.

So far, my WHS is supporting my Win7 64 bit perfectly. Backs up, I can access everything, etc. I think PP3 just adds tighter integration of the libraries and such.