T
thecapm521
Guest
I wanted to run something off of my old Windows XP install, so I plugged it in as an external hard drive and attempted to boot from it. The machine blue screened on me. (I now know this is a bad idea). I then attempted to boot as I normally would from my internal hard drive, which has Windows 7 installed on it. It would not boot. I went through the start up recovery wizard with no luck. I swapped the drives and was able to boot XP. The device manager showed that the disk with windows 7 on it is now exactly the same size as the disk with XP on it (it used to be significantly bigger) and it needed to be formatted. I didn't want to do that, so I tried another avenue. I booted an Acronis disk drive cloning CD with both drives attached. When selecting the Windows 7 disk, Acronis reports that the disk itself is the size of the XP disk but contains volume that is the correct size, which of course is larger than the reported disk size itself. Odd. So I know the volume is still there, but something screwy was probably written to the MBR on the Windows 7 disk when I tried to boot from the other drive. Any ideas how to repair the Windows 7 disk? I'm trying to get it to recognize it's true size and boot properly again without formatting or reinstalling the OS for fear of irreparably losing disk space or data.
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