Win7 & Vista

[marciokoko]

On my dell xps1330 i had vista that came with my pc.

I created a secondary partition when win7 came out and installed it on it. But the partition I had Vista on was very small, so now i cant even install office on it. So i want to erase the old, vista, original, primary partition and fuse it to my secondary, new, win7 partition. But from win7 I cannot format or erase the vista one. Disk Manager wont let me.

Hlp pls

 

[Britton30]

Partiton or Volume Extend. Try this tutorial. There is a link in it for Partition Wizard home Ed which may be helpful.
The Vista partition can't be marked as active.

 

[marciokoko]

It won't let me delete the partition

Yes but when I go into disk management, and select the vista partition and right click, the Delete option is greyed out.

The vista partition reads System, Page File, primary, healthy.

The win7 partition reads boot, crash dump, healthy, primary.

A third partition is empty.

 

[Britton30]

Post a snip of your disk management expanded.

 

[marciokoko]

disk management

here is the screenshot

 

[Britton30]

Click Properties and see if you can format the volume. Then remove the drive letter, and try my first suggestion.

 

[marciokoko]

Format Option Greyed Out

If you can see in the picture, the Format & delete options are greyed out! I cant.

 

[derekimo]

If you can see in the picture, the Format & delete options are greyed out! I cant.

I'll let the experts give you a definite answer but I suspect it might be because it is at the beginning of the drive, I don't see a system reserved either so your MBR is probably in that partition since it was the original OS.

 

[Bill2]

The vista partition is the system partition which means it contains the boot files, thats why disk management wont let you finger it. Use this tut to mark the win7 partition active.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html

Reboot, windows wont boot because the win7 partition doesnt contain the required files. So now boot from the install dvd or a system repair disk and run startup repair upto 3 times with reboots.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html

 

[marciokoko]

Ok, lemme ask you this. As you can see I have up to 2 more partitions, or rather, another partition and an un-allocated space. Could I just add those 2 to my win7 partition to make it bigger and leave the vista(D partition untouched?

 

[Bill2]

Ok, lemme ask you this. As you can see I have up to 2 more partitions, or rather, another partition and an un-allocated space. Could I just add those 2 to my win7 partition to make it bigger and leave the vista(D partition untouched?

Yes, you can. Only thing is you'll need to use Partition wizard because the E: partition that you want to merge is located on the left of the win7 partition. The native disk management lets you add only space to the RIGHT and contiguos of the parent partition. Use this tut to merge.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93322-partition-wizard-use-bootable-cd.html?ltr=P

Before doing all this, back up any important data on the 2 partitions that are going to be merged into the win7 partition. Then using PW, delete those 2 partitions and pull the slider across to merge, as explained in the tut.

Make sure you dont mix up the partition letters.