Removing Windows 7 from the Primary partition of a Dual Boot system.

I have two partitions on my HDD. A 'suspect' Windows 7 Home (that originally came with my 'refurbished' second hand laptop) is installed in the only Primary partition. A legitimate copy of Windows 7 Professional is (now) installed in an Extended Logical partition. My laptop boots up in Windows 7 Professional, if no other selection is made. I now wish to remove the suspect installation, and revert to having just one partition containing my Windows 7 Professional, without formatting the whole HDD and reinstallng/restoring everything currently on the second, logical partition. Is this possible, and if so, how?

What kind of BIOS you have? UEFI or Legacy (MBR)?
Can you give us a snapshot of disk manager?
Do you have a external HDD to make a backup image of your Win 7 pro partition?

Hi Mick,
The easy way make a system image of your Pro set-up, using macrium or Acronis, both free.
Then just install it as a new but with only 1 partition

If you want to check the validity of your home premium, run this copy/paste the output
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=52012
note that comp would have come with W7 home if its 4+ years old.

Roy

Reply to Megahertz
"What kind of BIOS do you have? UEFI or Legacy (MBR)?
Can you give us a snapshot of disk manager?
Do you have a external HDD to make a backup image of your Win 7 pro partition?[/QUOTE]"

Until yesterday I had never heard of UEFI or GPT so I'm assuming that I'm using BIOS/MBR.
Disk Manager snapshot attached.
Yes I do have an external HDD.

Reply to:
"Hi Mick,
The easy way is to make a system image of your Pro set-up, using macrium or Acronis, both free.
Then just install it as new but with only 1 partition

If you want to check the validity of your home premium, run this copy/paste the output
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=52012
note that computer would have come with W7 home if its 4+ years old.

Roy"

Thanks Roy,
I was rather hoping to be able to do something 'simpler' like erasing/formatting the Primary partition (without deleting it) and then merging it with the other partition (using Partition Master), because I've never successfully restored anything using the Windows Backup process, and recently Backup has refused to work anyway (I'm now using EaseUS Todo). I'll investigate Macrium and/or Acronis.

I wasn't bothered about the 'suspect' Windows 7 (which Mocrosoft has already 'rejected' as not being genuine), as I already had a legitimate 64 bit Windows 7 Pro CD that I purchased to upgrade my laptop from the 32 bit Vista it came with.

Mick

Reply to:
AddRAM
"However you do it, W7 has to be installed on a Primary Partition, or you at least have to have a System Reserved partition remaining when you wipe the suspect W7 install, if not you`ll have to run a startup repair to get W7 booting again. And a startup repair does not always work.

Post a shot of Disk Management before making any changes."

I'm not sure about the creation/use of System Reserved partitions, but will investigate. My reason for asking for help is that I don't trust the Windows Backup/Restore process or their so called Startup Repair disk as I've never had any success with either, but thanks for the warning anyway.

Snapshot of Disk Manager attached.

Mick

In Windows Disk Management
- The BOOT partition is where Windows is installed and running from, it can be Primary or Logical.
- The SYSTEM, ACTIVE partition is where the bootloader is, it must be Primary.

For Legacy BIOS / MBR the only partition that needs to be Primary is where the bootloader is.
A Windows OS can be installed on a Logical partition.
The Windows [C] partition can have the Windows OS and the bootloader, and i think that is what the OP wants.

If the [D] partition is deleted now, Windows will not startup.
Before the [D] partition can be deleted, the bootloader needs to be moved to [C], and [C] must be a Primary Active partition.

Also, there is very little free space now on C or D.
Less than 10% free space can cause problems, some things may not work correctly, if at all.

@Mick47
Can you get and attach a larger drive to your laptop ?
I would get a larger drive and "migrate" the Win 7 Pro to the new drive.
That way, you don't make any changes to the current drive, until you know everything works on the new drive.

You would have to be able to replace the current drive with a new drive for this approach to work.
I don't know how easy or possible that is with your laptop, or your hardware experience.

If you can't "Build/Migrate" to a new larger drive, it gets complicated and risky, making these changes to your current drive.
Make sure you have backup (images) of your current drives before making any changes.
Backup to an external drive using the program you trust such as EaseUS Todo, Macrium, etc.