Check in Disk Mgmt to see if your Win7 partition is marked "System Active Boot" - otherwise you'll have more problems with boot-critical files on your data/jambalaya partition.
Use Paragon Rescue disk as suggested by our top Install Guru here. It also is the single most valuable tool you could have to recover files if Win7 won't boot or repair with Repair DVD/CD.
Take ownership will not work, the Windows folder is an INSANE maze of permissions as well as ownership assignments.
Easiest way is to copy data you want to keep off of the partition and repartition it.
Second easiest is to boot up a non Windows 7 Disk utility, WinPE etc (Possibly even Linux) and delete it that way.
I just went through this and after about a half hour of permisions hell I gave up and repartitioned it :)
You might want to make sure the SSD is first in bios boot order - and/or make sure the other HD doesn't have an active partition on it.
[QUOTE=gregrocker;787229]Check in Disk Mgmt to see if your Win7 partition is marked "System Active Boot" - otherwise you'll have more problems with boot-critical files on your data/jambalaya partition.
Disk Mgmt says my Disk 0 drive has 2 partitions:
System Reserved: Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) <== standard 100MB for SSD drives
C: Healthy(Boot, CrashDump, Primary Partition) <== 59.63 GB NTFS which is correct
Disk 1 has 1 partition:
F: Healthy (Page File, Active, Primary Partition)
So C: does not show as Active but does this matter? I mean, everything works OK. In particular, I haven't done it in a long time but I know I can boot directly from C: with the F: drive powered off.
Type
diskpart
sel vol f
inact
exi
If you want to inactivate F - not necessary here , tho.
That looks fine as it is.
You Win7 is correctly labeled for both its component partitions, but as SIW2 says you should consider deactivating F as having it marked active is potentially problematic and incorrect.
Use the commands he gives from an elevated CMD prompt in Win7 or Repair disk.
Thanks greg & siw2 - I have looked at the diskpart command and it certainly seems straightforward. But are you saying that using it to make the F: partition inactive will then allow me to delete the old Vista Windows folder? In other words, is it true that what Win7 is checking is not the permissions etc. of the individual files in the old Vista Windows folder, but whether or not that folder is in an active partition?
No, you will still have the permissions issues.
The marking of the partition being active is only a boot issue resolution (which you may not be having).
Use of a non Windows 7 disk utility to erase the Windows folder or reformatting the partition are the only "easy" options for deleting an old installed Vista or windows 7 folder that I know of.
fseal:
thanks. I used diskpart to set the old Vista drive's partition to Inactive. After rebooting I used Disk Mgr. to check the partition status and was a little surprised to find that the now-active partition is not the one from which I boot Win7 but instead the 100MB System Reserved partition, which is the other partition on my SSD.
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