Windows 7: Deleting old partition

Hey guys,

Quick question:

I have two partitions...one is an old partition I believe used by the factory on my laptop that belonged to vista, and the other is the one for Windows 7.

Vista one says primary partition
Windows 7 ones says primary partition, boot, system, page file, active, crash dump



Will I have any issues deleting the Vista partition?

Thanks!

Hello AbuMusaab. Welcome to the forum.

No, you won't have any issue with deleting the Vista partition. Providing that there is no data on the partition you want to keep, of course!

"Primary" is just a type of partition. If you are installing an OS it needs to be installed into a Primary partition, not a Logical one.

EDIT: If you open Disk Management, is the Vista partition to the left or the right of the Windows 7 partition?

Thank you for the welcome and the response.

The vista partition is to the left of the Windows 7 partition.

Probably the recovery partition that was installed by the system manufacturer to make re-installation easier if your c:\ gets trashed for some reason. It is also the way that the manufacturers get out of providing you with proper DVD/CD copies of the software when you buy a new machine. You will be best using a partition manager to delete the partition and recover the space.

I dual boot ubuntu and windows and in grub, it showed me this other partition. I've never used it. I am ready to delete it, but I just want to have some confidence that it's not going to mess up my boot, or break anything. I feel fairly confident...but I've been burned before.

As long as it is just marked, in Windows Disk Management, as a primary partition then you will be OK. I recall that the partition that has the MBR on it is marked Active and Boot. I don't know anything about Linux partitions.

When you delete the partition it will become "Unallocated Space". The only issue you will have is that you will not be able to extend the Windows partition into the unallocated space to the left of the system partition using Disk Management. It just seems to me that gaining the extra space for C: would be the only reason to go through the trouble. So to do that you would need to use a disk management program like Partition Wizard. The free version won't do it, but the bootable CD will, I am told. There is a tutorial on it on this forum.

You could just format that partition and use it for personal data. How big is it?

Thanks for the help. That is what I suspected, but I appreciate your confirmation. What I was not aware of is that I wouldn't be able to merge that partition with another drive. But it makes sense. I might be able to merge it through linux, but if deleting it is no problem, then I can rest assured.

The partition is only 14-15 GB.

I deleted the partition. And have encountered no issues. I have not reformatted it, nor have I tried to merge it. I will either try to merge it with C or, if I want to merge it with linux partition, I can shrink Windows 7 partition by 15gb, then merge it with the old vista partition of 15gb, then format the ex-Windows 7 15gb in the ext4 format and merge it with the linux partition.

Thanks for the help!

Keep me informed about merging the partitions. I have not had the opportunity to try the Partition Wizard bootable CD (that you burn yourself from ISO) to do that process and would be very interested to know that it works. I have my CD but I need a test case to come along that I can test it on.

I tried 3 different free Disk Management programs that you install on the PC and none would perform the extend-to-the-left function. But they all said that their paid versions would do that.

I used Acronis to merge them with success.