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In the past, when I migrated to Win10 from WinXP, I created a dual boot for safety. The boot manager was installed on XP HDD and Win10 was installed on a new separate SSD. Still works great.

Now, I don't need this dual boot any longer but I do want to keep the Win10 SSD with all the setting. Is it possible? When I disconnect the old HDD where the boot manager is installed, the computer doesn't know how to boot. What should I do to make that Win10 SSD partition become bootable by itself without needing old XP boot manager? Is it even possible or do I face complete re-install of Win10?

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  • Have you tried booting form W10 install disk and doing a boot repair?
    – Kyle H
    Commented Feb 14, 2018 at 19:12
  • yes, I get a blue screen with an error which indicates that I need to use recovery tools, however trying to repair results in "can't repair".
    – Dima
    Commented Feb 14, 2018 at 21:13
  • I'm sure there is a way to do this with Windows tools but I am not as familiar with those. IMO depending on your comfort level, it may be just as easy to go ahead and install GRUB over the Win bootloader temporarily. GRUB is a linux bootloader, compatible with Windows. It would find all Windows installs on your system and add a boot entry automatically. Then next update or boot repair would overwrite GRUB with a fresh Win bootloader. help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing
    – Kyle H
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 19:37
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    Fair enough :) You need to reinstall the bootloader on the new W10 disk. Ah, have you set the W10 disk to bootable in diskmgmt.msc (Disk Management) and then change boot order in BIOS to boot W10 first? If you do that and boot into a W10 install disk to do startup repair I think it may fix it.
    – Kyle H
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 20:17
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    The other partition will deactivate because you are activating another to boot from. The other partition will still exist on disk but you will be able to boot W10 and still see your XP partitions. In the W10 bootloader you will be able to add your XP install to boot from.
    – Kyle H
    Commented Feb 16, 2018 at 21:29

1 Answer 1

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You will want to set your W10 partition as active in diskmgmt.msc first. Then you will be able to boot into W10 and your disk with xp will still be accessible.

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