System partition delete?

[Sprogget]

I've got 7 & Vista on two separate hdd's as a dual boot config. I've decided that the 7 build I have is robust enough to stay until my bought & paid for copy turns up, so I would like to lose Vista altogether off the system, so as to have 7 installed on a small partition on drive 1 & use drive 2 & the rest of drive one for media storage, since that's the main purpose of the machine.

Vista though is the system partition & I can't therefore format it as windows restricts me from doing so. I'm more than comfortable creating & deleting partitons and changing the system around to suit, but this is new to me.

So, is it advisable & if so, how do I go about it, short of rebuilding 7 over the existing Vista build on that drive. Command prompt at Boot? Use Vista disk to format the partition? or leave well alone?

[green granite]

My thought would be to leave things as they are until your new discs arrive, then install the new one over the vista install.

[Jofm5]

Sprogget,

Firstly the usual blurb in reminding you that you will have to re-install all applications - even those on your ancillary drives because they will typically have their configuration information in the registry where the hive is in the windows system directory.

If you do still wish to proceed you need to use the windows 7 dvd to boot and go into the partition configuration as part of start up - there can only ever be a single active partition so that will be the one you want to delete - it will ask you to authenticate you want to deactivate and delete the active partition and if you do so you may be required to re-type the label/serial number of the partition as confirmation.

Green_Granite is correct, most systems nowadays will allow you to select a different disk as a default disk, in doing so you could buy a cheap hdd and select that as a default and do a clean fresh install - your other disk will still be seen as a secondary disk and you will be able to assisng drive letters to whichever partitions you want on that disk so the config is familiar to you. I would prefer to do this not because I would consider going back to vista after a decision you have made but because hindsight is a wonderful thing - the moment you delete that partition you may realise there was the odd thing you never backed up or did not work.

Whilst disk space is so cheap I would err on the side of caution, if possible - but its not too hard if you want to be bold...

[Sprogget]

The current thinking is that seven is installed on a small logical partition to separate it from the frequently changing mountain of media data (recorded tv, movies music etc) on the rest of the same drive.

The idea was to have that partition as the os in perpetuity & thus free up something like 950gb across that & the other drive for media.

From my own reading, it seems that won't be easy to do, with the possible exception of booting from the ms dvd & using it to format drives as required, then bailing out of the install once formatting is complete.

Since I enjoy this kind of mucking around with pc's (geek), I might just do that. Thanks for the advice.

[Jofm5]

You should not have to bail out of the install if you install a second drive and set that as the boot drive in the bios.

Your new drive will have the default partion of C: under windows 7 and the other partions can be set to what you want.

Any partition can be assaigned any disk letter you like using the disk manager in administrative tools under 2000/xp/vista/w7 - the problem you have is the primary active partition is not able to be changed as it has the operating system on. IF you can set in the bios to say it is a secondary new disk then you can perform a new install on that disk without disturbing what is already there - and then use the disk manager to set what was the D: Drive back to being D: once done.

It all depends on what you want to do - you can install windows 7 and destroy what is there (no need to quit out of it as thats one of the options) or you can fool it using the bios into thinking it is a clean install.