Windows 7: Dual booting vista and windows 7, want to remove vista all together

Alright, this is what's going on.

I installed vista on my harddrive, and then made a partition and installed windows 7 on it.


I no longer want vista, and just want windows 7.

How would I go about deleting vista all together, and just have windows 7?


If I make the windows 7 partition active, it won't boot.

Thanks!

The quick and easy would be wiping the Vista primary entirely as well as the reformat of the 7 primary for use as a second storage partition or simply delete that entirely to see one main primary for a clean install of 7 there. The other option is nuking the Vista primary only and leaving an empty partition in front of the inplace repair install option outlined in the tutorial on that. Repair Install

Hi Spen,

Bootmgr will be on the first partition - your Vista partition. Both your Vista and Win 7 partitions are booted thru that first partition - called the System partition.

It is easiest to do as Nighthawk suggests - specially as you have only just installed 7.

Reinstall 7 by booting from the dvd, during the reinstall -click Drive Options (advanced) to get to the partitioning screen- repartition as you wish. Makes sense to get rid of both the currently installed o/s at that stage.

Then install 7 on the first partition.

Hope it helps

SIW2

I'm on a netbook, and I don't have a DVD drive or thumb drive (only 1gig)

What I did was, install xp via thumb drive, upgrade to vista, make a partition and install windows 7 on it.

Thanks for the replys guys.

If you had mentioned that earlier I likely would have pointed you to an article for seeing an iso image mounted on a virtual cd/dvd drive. Mount an ISO image in Windows Vista :: the How-To Geek

Alright, I installed VistaBootPro.

From what I am getting, vista holds my bootmanger.


So I went into bootpro, system bootloader, and installed the bootloader into my E drive (one with windows 7).

Made the vista drive not active, and I made the windows 7 drive active.


One I rebooted, it said something about could not find bootmang.

So I had to use gparted and flag the vista drive as boot again.


Also, this might help:



Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {f6ba2e04-0609-11de-b912- e26911930d0a}
displayorder {current}
{f6ba2e06-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
{ntldr}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=E:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {f6ba2e06-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=E:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {f6ba2e04-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
nx OptIn
numproc 2
usefirmwarepcisettings No

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {f6ba2e06-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
device ramdisk=[E:]\Recovery\f6ba2e06-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a\Winre.wim,{f6ba2e07-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
path \windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Recovery Environment
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice ramdisk=[E:]\Recovery\f6ba2e06-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a\Winre.wim,{f6ba2e07-0609-11de-b912-e26911930d0a}
systemroot \windows
nx OptIn
detecthal Yes
winpe Yes

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=C:
path \ntldr
description Earlier Version of Windows

VistaBootPro was another mistake made there. That was a ripoff of the EasyBCD tool available at Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies by one of the programmers that left from what I was able to find out when first seeing that and later tracking down the original program at Neosmart.

The best possible way to see 7 go on as a stand alone OS since you lack a dvd drive would be reformatting the 7 primary then copy or move the 7 iso image there. Once you reformat the Vista primary you simply mount the iso image on a virtual dvd drive to run the installer for a clean install. Vista will be gone and 7 will be running on it's own.

I also got vistabootpro, but what about installing system bootloader,Vista bootloader or legacy bootloader?

Hello JeffLogan, welcome to Seven Forums!


You need to start a new thread in the General Discussion forum to get answers.

I installed Windows 7 when it came out last October (my operating system was Vista). I followed the instructions and didn't have any problems until about 3 weeks ago. The only thing I don't like about Windows 7 is that you can't drag pictures around and arrange them the way you want (unless I'm missing a setting somewhere!)

For the past 3 weeks, when I start my computer, instead of automatically going to Windows 7, I get a black screen giving me a choice of using either Windows 7 (which has all my programs & drivers installed on it) or reverting to Vista, which just has the computer factory installed stuff. Number one, how can I make that screen go away and just have Windows 7 as the default operating system? There are no system restore points on my PC that I can go back to before this problem started.

Also, while my computer is going into Windows 7, I can hear the hard drive working, like it's switching systems, and it makes this noise often when I am using it. I tried the instructions I found on this site and they didn't work. The only thing I was able to to was get rid of the windows.old file. I'm not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, but the instructions were simple and easy to follow.

Also, since I don't want to use the D drive partition as a recovery disk (I have a portable hard drive that I backed my entire C drive to), how can I delete the program files and windows file folders that are on the D drive? Everytime I try, I get a message that I need permission from TrueInstaller to remove the files. I either want to delete the drive completely and add the space to C & rename the CD/DVD drive or rename the D drive and save files to it and add it to my monthly back up.

Anyone have any ideas? I have tried calling Dell Customer Support, but although my computer is still under warranty, they want to charge me for help because I didn't buy the Windows 7 Upgrade from them. Technically, my computer was eligible for a FREE upgrade, but they claimed I didn't purchase it in the correct time frame. I just went ahead and bought a copy because that was a lot easier than trying to fight them for it.