Remove XP and Win 7 Dual boot on separate drives

[Phrozenbuns]

Hi All,
Being a newbie to this forum, I am sure this question has been asked before, but I still need to ask the question anyway
I have a laptop with two 350Gb Hard drives installed.
XP was the original OS loaded on the (C) drive and I recently loaded Win 7 (32bit) on the (D) drive with the dual boot option.
I now have no further use for XP, as I am using Win 7 only, and so I want to delete\remove\re-format the (C) drive so that I only have a Win 7 OS.
Is it possible to remove XP without having to reformat both the hard drives, and thereby losing all my installed programs on the (D) drive, or can I reformat the (C) drive only, without making changes to the (D) drive?
If it helps, I have attached a screen dump of the Drive Management map.
Any help/explanations or pointing me in the right direction will be appreciated.

 

[Lomai]

Hi phrozen

Welcome to Seven Forums
Have a look at this Seven Forums thread

Hope this helps and regards

 

[gregrocker]

Boot into XP to mark Win7 active in Disk Mgmt, power down to Unplug the XP HD, set the Win7 HD as first HD to boot in BIOS setup,

Next boot the WIN7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots to repair or rewrite the MBR until Win7 starts on its own.

You should then be able to plug back in the XP HD to format it in Disk Mgmt. If not, boot the Win7 DVD Repair/Repair CD to clean that HD using DISKPART: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html

 

[SIW2]

Might help to mark 7 partition active first.

 

[gregrocker]

OP says he has WIn7 on D which is already System Active.

Apparently he is quoting drive letters as viewed from XP, when the screenshot is from Win7 relative view.

 

[SIW2]

Win7 is on C in that screenshot.

Yes, he will need to mark 7 partition active and create the boot critical files. A few runs of startup repair will do the latter.

 

[gregrocker]

OK I see now that he's using Win7 Disk Mgmt which is viewing C relatively. He must have posted drive letters as read from XP. Confusing.

OP: If this is the case, you will want to go into XP Disk Management to mark Win7 active,

Power down to unplug XP HD,

Restart into BIOS setup to set Win7 HD as first HD to boot (after DVD drive),

then boot the WIn7 DVD repair console, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots until Win7 starts on its own.

You can then power down, plug back in XP HD to format it, or if it interferes run Clean all from WIn7 DVD/CD as given earlier.