How to Uninstall W7 When In A Multi-Boot

Hi Gary,

There can be one Active partition per hard drive.

You may have seen this referred to as "Flagged On" if you have used Linux, or a Linux tool such as Gparted.

If you right click an inactive partition in Disk Management, you will get an option to "Mark partition as Active ". (Do not do this - the other partitions on that drive would then be inactive and you won't be able to boot.)

First you need to boot into Vista. Then remove the 7 boot files using Easy BCD.

Then, in Vista's Disk Management, right click on the 7 partition and format it. Or you could delete the 7 partition if you want to change the partition sizes on that drive.

Barefoot kid - looks the same procedure for you too.

Hope it helps

SIW2

Hi Smarteyeball,

Thanks for posting the screenshot - it's interesting.

I installed 7 first on a new HD and then Vista after 7. Your setup may be different:

7 created a small (200mb) partition at the beginning of the drive (containing all the boot data) and then installed itself on the next partition.

So my system looks like:

Hd0,0 (200mb boot data)
Hd0,1 (107GB Windows 7 6801)
Hd0,2 (195GB Vista x64)
Hd0,3 (290GB Data)

Both 7 and Vistas boot data reside on the 200MB partition. In my case, deleting that 200MB partition will wipe out Vista's boot as well.

Was that a new hd that you partitioned with Win7 during the installation ?

Everyone else seems to have installed after Vista and got the expected result , i.e. 7 installs it's boot files on the existing Active partition ( which for most people is the partition that already contains Vista's boot and o/s files ).

As you installed 7 first , it seems to have made it's own additional first partition.

Anybody else done the same thing, and got the same result?

It's a good thing as you can make an image of that 200mb partition to restore in an emergency. I have the Paragon Drive Backup, which lets you make a small bootable cd - so you can boot in , find the backup image and restore it - I assume Acronis etc are pretty much the same?

You could try using EasyBCD to remove the 7 boot files from the 200mb partition.

You might find that Vista doesn't know they've been removed and will still show 7 as a boot option. In that case it can be deleted from the boot tab in msconfig.

It will be fun to see how this pans out for us all

SIW2

Wait, so SIW2, what you're saying is (assume fresh install on a clean hard drive), if I had a 100GB HD and I (hd0,0) was a 200MB partition and the rest 99.8GB was (hd0,1), I can guide the 7 installer to install boot files to the 200MB partition?

Does that mean that when I get to the disk management page in the setup, that I select (hd0,0) as my installation partition? or will it automatically install the boot files to the first partition?

As for a backup of my boot record (not windows boot files), I use HD Hacker to create a raw image of my MBR just incase.

Also, just to clear something up with the 'active' partition thing. I recall when I installed OS X, I had to mark my 4th primary partition dedicated towards it as 'active' through the command line. I then decided to boot up GParted and check how the flags were re-associated, and my Vista partition was no longer the boot partition, (hd0,3) was. This insured that my MBR was not touched, and Darwin was installed to the bootsector of (hd0,3) - my question, does the same go for Windows?

Say I had GRUB on the MBR, can I tell Windows not to touch the MBR by flagging my second partition (or whichever partition I want to install it onto) as 'active'/boot?

Thanks for all the info so far everyone.