dual boot question

[jhlindell]

I have an hp laptop with 2 hard drives in it. Drive 0 had windows vista on it. I decided to try windows 7, so I put it on drive 1. The laptop dual boots. Windows 7 works perfectly and I want to get rid of vista. Looking at the drives in Disk Management I see the following:

Disk 0: (Vista)
Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

Disk 1: (W 7)
Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

I was messing around and unintentionally marked disk 1 as active.

What I want to do is to wipe disk 0 completely and just use it as data storage. Disk Management won't let me format the drive though. How can I accomplish this. Did I screw anything up by marking disk 1 as active?

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello jhlindell, welcome to Seven Forums!





Marking the Windows 7 partition as active is half of the issue, now that you have done that you will need to do 3 separate startup repairs with system re-starts between the repairs to finish the process, then when you have Windows 7 booting on it's own, you can do whatever you like with the HDD that has Vista on; be sure to post back to keep us informed or if you have further questions.


How to Run a Startup Repair in Windows 7

 

[theog]

Can you post a screen shot Disk management & the unhide contents of Disk 0 & Disk 1?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-how-post-screenshot-seven-forums.html

Screenshot tools.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9717-screenshot-paint.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/51160-screenshot-upload-using-mwsnap.html
Fscapture free download

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

After you get Windows 7 booting normally you can use the tutorial at the link below to do a wipe "secure erase" on the Vista HDD, just make sure there's no data on it you need as this will over-write any/all data on the HDD and it will be un-recoverable.


SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

 

[gregrocker]

Before running Startup Repair x3, either swap the Vista HD cable to Win7 HD, or enter BIOS setup to set WIn7 HD as first HD to boot, after DVD drive.

Then keep the Vista HD unplugged while you run Startup Repair from the booted DVD Repair console until Win7 starts up.

If Startup Repair fails after 3 times, then make sure Win7 is marked active: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html