Removing Old Distributions

I currently dual boot XP and 7. They are located on two separate hard drives, each partitioned.

Windows XP is on disc 0, and 7 on disc 1.

Disc 0: D 48gb partition (main partition for XP), 4.88gb free space, F 225gb (Data partition - want to keep)

Disc 1: C (7 main partition), G (data partition)

I would like to extend the F partition on disc 0 to take up the full drive - that is, delete D (xp primary partition) and combine all the free space with the Data partition.

Can this not be done using Win 7 disk management? I cannot format, delete, etc on drive D (XP partition). I'm not sure what I need to do in order to be able to delete that partition. D has described as (system, active, primary partition) and C (7 partition) is described as (boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition). The data partitions are both just logical drives.

Yes - XP was installed first.

I will look into what you said and try it. However, if that is the case, why does Disk 1:C (7 partition) say "boot" in the list of items, whereas Disk 0 (XP) does not? Does this refer to something else other than those boot records?

Thanks for the responses. Your original solution fixed the problem. I unplugged the extra hard drive and booted with Windows 7 dvd. I had to do that process three times I think (took a long time since it had to reload each time) to finally get it to fix the boot issues - I guess it had to do several things and only did one at a time unfortunately.

After that, I plugged the other drive back in and was able to work with the partitions on it. Unfortunately I could not figure out how to combine "unallocated space", "free space", and the data partition into one large data partition. I could not delete the "free space" to have it join with unallocated, etc. I ended up just copying all files from data partition to the OTHER drive (it has plenty of room), deleted everything on the extra drive, and created one single partition.

It was a bit of a work around to get the result I wanted, and there were several steps involved, but in the end it worked and I was able to do it with the windows 7 disk management and did not have to rely on other software (although perhaps it might have been easier).

So it seems that if users have XP pre-installed and install Windows 7 to dual boot, even if windows 7 is on a new drive, it places the boot records on the original XP drive. To me, it seems like it would make more sense to put them on the drive with Windows 7, since chances are high that the user is upgrading and simply keeping XP until they no longer feel the need for it. Oh well.