WinXP + 8 dual boot, XP is boot, how to remove XP?

[CorrND]

I have a situation where I have Windows XP and Windows 8 in a dual boot with the OSs on physically separate drives. WinXP was installed long ago on an HDD and Win8 was added from an upgrade disc and installed on a new SSD. The point was to do a fresh install of 8 on a brand new drive and remove XP and the old/small/slow drive it's on altogether. Dual-boot was not my intention, it just seems to have happened because I pointed the Win8 installation to the new SSD.

It appears I made a big error because Windows XP remains the primary/boot drive. I removed that drive from the system and obviously get nothing on startup.

Anybody have any tips on how to simply make the new SSD with Win8 the boot drive so I can jettison the WinXP HDD?

 

[Tmagic650]

Can you change the boot drive in the bios boot menu?

 

[CorrND]

I tried a quite a few suggestions online with no success -- I shied away from the ones that seemed more low-level than should have been necessary -- but I just followed the directions on this site and it was a VERY simple fix to my issue:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestoreUbuntu/XP/Vista/7Bootloader

Specifically I did:

1. Create USB recovery drive from within Win8
2. Shut down
3. Disconnect HDD with WinXP
4. Load to recovery drive
5. Navigate recovery menu to the Command Prompt button
6. Enter "bootrec.exe /fixboot"
7. Enter "bootrec.exe /fixmbr"
8. Restart

Voila.

 

[gbhall]

Good. What you did essentially was totally remove the physical drive that contained both XP and the new multi-boot setup for win 8. Then you simply created a new boot loader for Win 8 alone - on the drive Win 8 actually lives on.

 

[Benmar]

Goto my computer click my computer then go to properties, then select advance settings then go to start up and recovery then click edit under start up and recovery, delete
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
click save then the windows XP will gone now.

 

[gbhall]

@Benmar you keep on posting into older posts without reading the entries. This was completely solved. Also your post does not address the original requirement, which was to totally remove a small old HDD containing XP and the bootup files. Furthermore, your example is limited to XP. Win 7 and later have an entirely different bootup method. Your level of knowledge is such that I advise you to stick to things you really know about.

 

[hbernabe13]

I tried a quite a few suggestions online with no success -- I shied away from the ones that seemed more low-level than should have been necessary -- but I just followed the directions on this site and it was a VERY simple fix to my issue:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestoreUbuntu/XP/Vista/7Bootloader

Specifically I did:

1. Create USB recovery drive from within Win8
2. Shut down
3. Disconnect HDD with WinXP
4. Load to recovery drive
5. Navigate recovery menu to the Command Prompt button
6. Enter "bootrec.exe /fixboot"
7. Enter "bootrec.exe /fixmbr"
8. Restart

Voila.

you should try bootrec /rebuildbcd