How to change the old vista system partition to be not "system"

[SaxTeacher]

How to change the old vista system partition to be not "system"

My computer had one HDD and vista. Today I installed a new faster hard drive (a Seagate Momentus, which is a sort of hybrid SSD-HDD) and then I installed windows 7 on the new drive.

In Control Panel -> Computer Management -> Disk management, the new drive shows up as "Disk 1" (C:, NTFS, Healthy, boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

and the old hdd shows up as "Disk 0" (7.52gb recovery partition plus a 290.56gb partition (D:, Ntfs, Healthy, System, Active, Primary Partition)

Question 1: I would like to keep most of the files on the old drive (now D: ) but would like to remove vista from it. Is it possible to change the D: drive partition so that it is not a "System" Partition, then delete the Vista files from it? Or must I first copy my data off of it and then repartition it?

Question 2: If I must wipe the old partition, should I also wipe the "Recovery Partition" as well? Is there any advantage to keeping that?

Question 3: Should I create a "recovery partition" for windows 7? (I apologize for my lack of technical knowledge but I don't know what a recovery partition is or how it would be used.)

Thank you!

 

[DocBrown]

Would you post a screen snip of your Disk Management for us?

Start :ar: Computer Management :ar: Disk Management

 

[whs]

Here is what I would do:

1. Boot into Vista and create a Data Partition to where you move all your user folders from Vista. here is how: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72427-data-partition.html - although this tutorial is listed under Windows7, the method in Vista is exactly the same as described. Important: make sure you only move your folders to predefined folders in the new data partition, Not to the partition itself.

2. Now switch to Win7 and right click on each of the folders in the data partition (Documents, Music, etc.) and "Include" into the corresponding Win7 library.

3. Now you can delete the remains of the Vista partition. You best do that in Win7 Disk Management (right click on the partition).

4. You can delete the Vista recovery partition too unless you want to keep the option of reinstalling Vista one future day. You can consolidate the resulting freespaces and create a new partition.

5. You do not need a Win7 recovery partition because you obviously have the Win7 installation disk. You should, however, image your Win7 now and n the future. That is your best life insurance. You could use the newly created partition (from the freespaces) for the images. Here are 2 of my tutorials about imaging which should explain it all:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/128494-imaging-strategies.html


I am sure you now have many questions. Don't hesitate to ask.