I’ve been slowing working on moving over from XP to Vista on my main home desktop machine since August 2008. I finally decided to finish up on that today.
I had been running in a dual-boot config since August, with XP on my old drive, and Vista on a new drive. My goal for today was to switch to a plain old single-boot config, with the Vista drive as drive 0 and the XP drive reformatted, so I can use it for backups, as drive 1. The problem, of course, is that the old XP drive was technically the boot drive. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to switch things around so that I could boot from the Vista drive, but it’s actually a bit of a pain. I followed the instructions here, which sounded like they covered my situation perfectly, but that didn’t work, and I wound up having to boot the machine with my Vista install DVD and run a repair. It took awhile to get all the way through this, but I seem to have a working Vista install now, booting off the Vista drive. And I’m reformatting the old XP drive right now.
This all took longer than it should have. Microsoft really didn’t need to make the Vista boot process so darn arcane. But hey, I’m now 100% Vista, just in time for Windows 7 to come out…