Can't remove old windows 7 install on other partition.

I did a re-jig of my hard disks and partitions wanting the second hard disk as the windows 7 installed drive and the original windows 7 drive as just the data drive. All the data I wanted to keep was on the original windows 7 drive so I just moved the data out of the Users folder into it's own folder and went ahead and installed Windows 7 on the second drive without formatting / deleting the current Windows 7 install. The plan was to just delete the old windows stuff and leave the data intact.

So I am now booting the newly installed Windows 7 (c) and all my data is on d: as I wanted, but I cannot get rid of the windows, users, program files, program files (x86) and inetpub folders on the old drive (now d). I copied the BCD from the original to the newly installed drive and made the partition active as outlined in a post in this thread https://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-...partition.html but I still cannot delete those pesky old folders. It asks for admin privilges, which I give but it still bombs out at various points saying "permission required" or something like this.

The old disk is still marked as active in diskmangement and I can't see a way of turning this off. The new disk is also now marked as active.

1) Remove old drive.

2) Make sure your new HD is pluged in to SATA1 on mobo.

3) Check BIOS, make new drive first HD boot.

4) Reboot,if windows will not boot,do a startup Repair.

Startup Repair

5) When windows is OK,plug in old HD to SATA2.

6) Open an command prompt

type in command prompt

diskpart
list disk
select disk # (old HD)
clean all
create partition primary
select partition 1
actice
format fs=ntfs
assign
exit

You need to mark the old HD inactive before it will allow you to delete the system files.

Boot the Win7 DVD Repair console, or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to type:

DISKPART
LIST DISK
SELECT DISK # (replace # with old HD)
LIST PARTITION
SELECT PARTITION # (replace # with old Win7 partition)
INACTIVE
EXIT

Now see if you can delete old HD system files as Admin or after setting required permissions. If not, please post back a screenshot of your full Disk Mgmt drive map, using Snipping Tool in Start Menu, attaching file using paper clip in Reply box.

Ok guys - thanks very much for replying. I managed to do it using theog's method.

What happened to your data? Hope you backed it up.

SeanUK said:

Ok guys - thanks very much for replying. I managed to do it using theog's method.

That's good to here.

Help is always here.

gregrocker said:

What happened to your data? Hope you backed it up.

Yes I did back it up in the end. After making the original post this morning I figured it might be just as quick to backup it all up and start afresh install as to wait and try and figure out how to fix it. I found the replies at some point during the backup.

Cheers once again.

I didn't like the idea to format the whole disk just to get rid of those legacy windows installation files and folders. Thus I booted partedmagic from an USB stick, mounted the partition and removed the unwanted parts without a fuzz.