Solved I need to remove XP

[Britton30]

I have an old Dell laptop I replaced the HDD is a few months ago and have been dual booting XP and Vista Business. Now I want to just delete the XP partition and have Vista have the whole drive.

Will Partition Wizard bootable CD free do this with no issues? I have read that a CD will work better than a DVD, but can I boot it from a USB stick?

The boot flag is on the Vista partition.

 

[Boozad]

Wouldn't you just be able to format the partition when booted into Vista and then extend C: into it?

 

[gregrocker]

I'd use Partition Wizard boot CD which has never failed during resizing while the Windows version can.

First mark Vista Partition Active in Disk Mgmt.

Boot into Vista installation media or Repair CD, run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until Vista starts and holds the System Active Boot flags.

Now boot into PW CD to Delete XP partition and Resize Vista to the left: Partition Wizard Resize Partition - Video Help. Have your Vista boot CD standing by as resizing on the boot sector can sometimes require repair again.

 

[AddRAM]

Boot partition manager from USB Flash disk directly to manage disk partition - Partition Wizard Bootable Flash Drive.

Putting it on a dvd would be a waste

 

[gregrocker]

CD"s cost less than Partition Wizard Pro edition.


I think you can add PW ISO to stick using YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator (Windows) | USB Pen Drive Linux.

 

[Britton30]

Gav, I could if the XP partition was to the right of Vista.

Greg, damn, I hadn't noticed the Vista partition isn't marked active.
Yup, I have YUMI already and that's what I was going to try, if it won't work I can still make a bootable CD.

Brian, I have a boatload of DVD/+R laying around, so not a big deal, I think I might have a stray CD/R someplace.

 

[Britton30]

Okay people, I finally got it to work. I followed Greg's instructions, Vista held the Active and booted. Run the PW bootable (from a USB flash using YUMI) and deleted the XP partition, moved the Vista one to the left them extended it to the right all the way and Applied changes and rebooted.
Vista started with the shiny globe, the tinkle sound, then Preparing Desktop for 5-6 minutes, then to an empty light blue screen.
Ran Startup repair 6 time with no luck. I rebooted into PW set the Vista to inactiveand hit Apply, to my surprize it went to resizing again. Finished successfully as the first time.
As expected I got no Vista boot with no active partition. Ran Startup Repair and all was fixed, whew!
Here's what I have and wanted.



Posted from the Vista laptop with the old rusty trusty IE8.

Thanks for the help.

 

[gregrocker]

It's s best to run the Startup Repairs before you do the Resizing, so you'll know if the new System partition is going to boot before getting rid of the old one.

Glad it worked.

 

[jimbo45]

hi there

seemples

just type the following commands

bootrec/fixmbr
bootrec/fixboot

Now XP gone forever

You can then use the data area for anything else / merge / resize / just keep as a data partition.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[gregrocker]

As we've known here since beta, running only the bootrec commands does not finish the job. There is no longer a link to F8 System Recovery Options for one thing.

Startup Repairs go over every parameter to make sure nothing is awry, if necessary rewriting the boot files to the target partition, applying bootsect to make the drive bootable again.

Recently Mahmoud edited EasyBCD so that it now completes every task including restoring the F8 Repair link, so another good option now is Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD - Windows 7 Forums .