dual boot drives - one crashed
 

OK, a long time ago I installed another drive in my computer so I could boot to XP (the original OS) or to Windows 7. Well, the XP drive crashed and that had the boot loader on it. I am not concerned (much) with what was on the XP drive, but it would be nice to make the Win 7 bootable now that the other drive is dead. Can I just replace the boot files on the Win 7 drive and have it boot properly? I would really, really like to avoid reinstalling all the stuff on the Win 7 drive.

So, XP boots on 320GB drive and later install 500GB drive for Win 7 and years later the 320GB drive is dead and no boot.

I am assuming all the info is on the Win 7 drive but since the boot loader is on the other drive it needs replaced.

The problem I see is that the Windows registry probably has hard coded paths to the files, so if your main HD in Windows was showing as D: even after you write a loader to the boot sector it may present itself as C: instead, which will totally screw up a lot of stuff in your registry.

At least, that is what happened to me last time I did that ... but it has been 18 years since I've really done anything with windows besides wipe a drive and reinstall from scratch ... so I would hope that in half a dozen releases and countless service packs that has been "fixed".

Anyway, you'll want a recovery/install disk, boot wtih it, tell it where to write the bootloader and you are good to go.

The Win 7 drive was the C drive and the XP was the E drive. Thanks.

Then you should be good to go - just need a rescue/recovery disk to reinstall the bootloader

https://neosmart.net/wiki/recovering-windows-bootloader/

Got one of those. Thanks for the link.