Windows 7 Install help needed for w7 Pro & Vista64 Ultimate

[domineaux]

I've got Vista 64bit Ultimate currently installed on EIDE 400 gb HDD.
I bought the W7 Professional edition, because I won't use the features of W7 Ultimate.
Therefore a custom install is indicated by MSFT.

Bought a 1TB WD SATA drive
I disconnected the EIDE drive from computer and did a clean install of Windows 7 in SATA 1TB HDD. (works great).

Problem:
When I replugged the connector cables back into the EIDE drive....
My old drive is now configured as F: with all my programs and data
My new drive is configured as C:
Therefore, I cannot run the programs from the EIDE drive because of the changed drive designation.

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Not quite sure where I should start. Possibly I got ahead of myself by installing the Windows 7 on the new drive and letting windows installer do it's thing.

I really don't care to reinstall all the programs and data from the old IDE drive onto the new SATA drive. Entering all the serials, and waiting on the 300+gigs of applicaions and data could take days, of just sitting in front of the computer waiting on the various installers to process.

I think it would be best to keep the EIDE as C: drive to access all the programs and data as I have in the past. I would definitely like to use the windows 7 pro as my operating system, but I am OK with using the Vista with the Legacy HDD apps and data. I have all the factory disks for my software so I know I can install properly, if I install applications separately onto the W7 OS.

Possibly, erase,delete and reformat of the Win7 from the new disk is the answer. Maybe a dual boot is the answer. I think a dual boot would be preferred over partitioning the drive. I have had issues over time with failed partitions on the large drives. I've lost several terabytes of data in those processes. I'm not sure as I recall whether the problem was the partitioning or just a bad drive. --- regardless I lost the data.

At this point I'm fishing for some suggestions. I don't like to use third party fixit/workaround tools for anything on the system.

If you think a dual boot is the answer, maybe you could share alink for proper dual boot setup??

 

[tblount]

My bios menu has two options... one is boot priority and another one is for harddrives

unless I set the harddrive setting to use my 750 drive first, I can't get the boot priority to find it at all.

perhaps your bios has something like this that needs to be configured... I'm assuming I understand that you can simply unplug your eide drive and then you boot into your sata drive with no problem?

as for dual boot, my blogs have the three bcdedit commands you can run to set up the multi-boot menu.. and there is a program called easybcd that you can download that is menu driven... it may be easier but it doesn't alwyays work for me.

 

[domineaux]

My bios has HDD boot priority the selections are dubious. Don't have good designation, but it might be worth a try.

I can set Master/Slave on the EIDE drive, but the SATA has no such selection ability.

As I write this I only have the EIDE drive working, the new drive is unplugged. My EIDE drive has appx 100 gb free memory. I found this running ran diskmgmt utility.

Looking at the DM utility it would appear you can change the drive designations, but I'm not quite sure how far that goes and works well.

I appreciate your links and quick response.