remove XP bootable partition

gregglee said:

DocDJ said:

I suppose I'll have to move my E: logical partition to another drive, so it isn't sitting between XP and 7 (or will Acronis slide 7 across it?).

I'm not sure where you want Win 7 partition to end up. The simplest approach may be to for example.
1. Use partition Wizard to shrink the freeagentdrive partition on disk 1 to leave unallocated space at the beginning of the drive. You could also use PW change S to a logical partition.
2. Use acronis to clone the Win7 system to that unallocated space which creates a new system partition.
3. Use Bios to change boot drive to disk 1. That will assign C: to the Win 7 system and may change drive letters of other drive. Immediately used windows disk management to change the drive letters to match those assigned by XP, to avoid confusion. I assign x, y or z to other systems. e.g when booted in Win7, xp is Z, when booted in xp, winz=7 is Z. All other drives same. I include the desired drive letter in the drive name to make housekeeping easy. e.g freeagentdrive s, mydocsplus e. Disk numbers may be different from XP also, but doesn't matter. change also
4. Rebuild bootloader with bcdedit, Win7 install disk repair or tool of your choice. (I haven't personally tried PW for this.)

The great obvious advantage of having systems on different drives is that a drive failure doesn't take out both.

Thanks for the good advice. My 2 systems are on one drive, because that was all I had big enough, when I built the machine. I'll take your advice into account when I retry in May/June.

OP wants to delete XP.

Not mentioned yet is that you could delete XP, leave Win7 in place, mark Active and Repair. We tend to want OS partitions in the lower address where reads are faster.

Let us know how it goes. We'll be here to help.

gregrocker said:

OP wants to delete XP.

Not mentioned yet is that you could delete XP, leave Win7 in place, mark Active and Repair. We tend to want OS partitions in the lower address where reads are faster.

Let us know how it goes. We'll be here to help.

So you're saying I could just use pw to delete the XP partition & mark W7 active, then use my restore/repair CD to fix the MBR? And LATER I could move the W7 partition or just absorb the leading space into it? OR is the 2nd step more complex than it appears because the ptn is bootable?

It doesn't matter where the partition is when you mark it Active and run Repairs to write the System Boot files to it.

With PW CD you don't have to worry about copying or resizing the partition as it never fails, so moving it is no issue.

The only hitch could be that in rare cases Win7 will not repair to recover it's boot files. For this reason you might want to back up a Win7 system image of both OS partitions so you can start over, or you can clean reinstall Win7 which is always a nice fresh start. Reinstalling Windows 7

Thanks for the PW CD info. I have a hundred applications with all their settings,so I REALLY don't want to re-install. But just in case, that's why I moved "my documents" off the boot drive. And I will DEFINITELY create image backups before i jump into this again.

I'll keep you posted when I get into it.

DocDJ said:

gregrocker said:

It isn't necessary to move your middle Documents partition, just delete XP using PW CD, create a new partition in the space to the left of E, reimage C there.

Boot PW CD, mark Win7 partition Active, from Disk tab click Rebuild MBR, see if Win7 will start. If not boot the Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times until Win7 starts. Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

This might be able to be accomplished by simply copying the partition using PW CD, since there is no MBR to copy. You can leave the source partition on the HD until you make sure the copy works, as it will be inert once it's System Active flags are transferred to the copy by marking Active and Rebuilding MBR or running Repairs.

Thanks. I'll try that when I finish the semester.

I finally got time to get rid of the old XP partition. I first created a system image (C, (win7), D (XP) and E (my docs). Then I deleted the old XP, marked C as "active" and booted the system repair CD. It recognized there was a problem (the C drive did not show up as a system) and offered to repair it. I said "yes". Then I tried to re-boot C:, but no go. So booted the CD again (this time the C: drive showed up in the repair window), got to the command prompt and issued the usual 4 repair commands. System rebooted perfectly.
Made a NEW system image (and a new system repair CD - DID I HAVE TO MAKE A NEW CD???) and copied the E: ptn to a different drive and swapped drive letters. This allowed me to have all my folders keep their correct dates, which XCOPY would not do. Re-booted and now E: shows up on new drive(hooray).

Last step will be to Slide the C: drive to the beginning of the physical drive (leaving a 200MB space for a possible future bootmgr ptn), using PW and increase it's size.

Those line commands are automated in Win7 Startup Repair which will do the job if run up to 3 separate times. There may be other issues it needs to address as well.

Be prepared with DVD/Repair CD in rare cases to do it again when you slide C to the left or otherwise resize/move on the boot sector. Partition Wizard Move/Resize Partition Video Help.

I was just surprised to see the message, since many postings on this topic just say to go to the command prompt.
Do you know if I need to build a new repair CD after EVERY time I save an image? Or will one repair CD work for any future saves?

Yes, the Repair CD is fine as long as it is made after the latest SP, as with the installer.

Thanks. That will save a lot of CD's and time.