ok, here's the scenario. I have a 500gig HD with a few partiitions. Originally, i installed Vista on C and used it for the past year. i felt it was getting a bit bogged down and I recently installed it on another partition (now have dual boot). All is fine with the new OS, so now i am thinking of wiping the original install (C drive). BUT, i recall doing this before and getting into trouble--as in the no boot. I can't recall if this problem occured when i just deleted the files or formatted the original drvie (thus wiping the boot record? or some other essentail files). Any help or advise would be appreciated.

Vista as with all MS O/S installs boot information on C: no matter what partition you install on. I just ran intothis the other day and ended up wiping everything out. It is a real pissoff that they can't just make it use the MBR and the poartition you want like ,Linux can.

As for how to adjust this behaviour I am not sure. A repair after you wipe out the C:\ partition would probably do the trick

Someone with more experience using the recovery console might be able to point you in the right direction also

After formatting the C: drive, the MBR would still be intact as that's stored outside of the partition.

However, you would need to boot off of say the XP CD and enter the recovery console to repair the boot drive via the bootcfg /rebuild & fixboot c: commands.

I have moved and deleted a few times now messing about with multiple boot setups with XP pro vista32 and vista64 on different partitions and recovery is pretty simple as long as your install is left untouched on it's installed partition , on the full OEM versions of vista they have recovery console which will repair your boot or if you have a "cut down" version then you can source and burn a recovery CD provided by microsoft for free and hosted at neosmart.net

xp and vista use totally different methods of boot config files and neither recognise each other so you will only be able to use vista recovery for the job

Why you don't just delete the OS from C: and move its entry from the boot.ini ?

Vista doesn't use boot.ini

Wipe the disk you want to, popin the Vista DVD and selecr repair. Follow on screen instructions.