Windows 7 - Installed Win 7 dual boot alongside XP

What a fantastic forum with plenty of active engagement.

After reading the dual boot guide, I prepared my PC as follows yesterday

Created a separare partition on one of my Hard drives and did a custom installation of Win 7. Thsi all worked fine and I can now dual boot into either Win XP or Win 7.

My reasoning behind the dual boot was to give me some time to install all programs etc on Windows 7 whilst still having Win XP

I have a couple of questions

1) Once I am happy with the state of Win 7. I would like to retire the Win XP partition. How would I go about this and reclaim the space and add to existing partitions
2) Is there anything I woudl need to do on the dual boot screen so that it goes straight into Win 7

Thanks for your help

Kwack

Glad to here that you were able to accomplish your task using one of ourprovided reading materials

Welcome to Seven Forums.

#2, first. This tutorial will tell you How to Delete a Listed Operating System at Boot in Windows 7.

Once XP is taken off the boot menu then Windows 7 will be booted automatically, no boot menu.

Then you can format the XP partition. Retired, this will leave unallocated space ready to be taken by one of your partitions.

#1 will depend on the partition location. Windows disk management can expand a partition to the right only. If your XP partition is listed first (most likely) then the second partition will not be able to expand to the left.

But don't worry, a free Partition Manager can easily do that for you.
There are several installation, repair, partition, backup and miscellaneous tutorials, also some free programs that have been tested and work with Windows 7 at this sticky thread:
Tutorial quick reference list for Installing Windows 7

And a link to Partition Wizard, which will move and expand the partition anywhere you want.

Just reply here if you have any further questions.

Thanks for the advice - I will try this out at home once I have managed to install all of my numerous programs

Cheers
Kwack

Let us know how it all turns out

Well all seemed to be going fine. Then I renamed the windows XP folder and now it wont boot. It comes up with NTLDR missing. I tried to repair Win 7 but this failed.

I have reinstalled Win& and it appears to be working but when I reboot I do not get a dual boot option


Any ideas

Kwack

You need to run Startup Repair several times from your 7 installer Repair console.

If that fails, boot back into Repair Command Line and run "bootrec.exe /fixboot" and "bootrec.exe /fixmbr" or if those don't work "Bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force" without quotes.

Had you deleted the XP partition and recovered its space yet? What position did it occupy?

When you can boot then please take a screenshot of your Disk Management map so we can see where you are.

In the future, use the great new Windows 7 Image backup to save an image externally so if things fizzle you can reimage the drive in 15 minutes and start over fresh. These things can fail, and do.

I didnt delete the win xp partition. I renamed within Win 7 from LOcal Disk to 1.LOcal disk and it is still full of Win XP stuff.

I run startup repair initllt several tme and it eventually came up with Windows 7 cant repair this fault so ecided to re-install again.

can you access your XP data?

if you wanna post a screenshot we can help you achieve where you wanna go with it, like moving your data all into 7, then deleting XP, moving Windows 7 into that space, checking it all out with chkdsk for example.

The Win XP partition was only used for programs installs and doesnt contain any data. I was hoping via the XP dual boot to give myself some time to do installs to Win 7 over the next couple of weeks. then decomission XP at some point in the future.

Looks like the PC has decided that for me so will press on and do all program installs on Win & and then decomission XP partition an retrieve teh space shortly.

I am not too keen in trying a repair agian as it didnt work last time and then had to completely re-install. I figure if I got Win 7 working I should stick with that??

Thanks for all the advice

Kwack