Safest way to remove XP (7 and XP dualboot)

Okay I have my harddrive partitioned in half one has XP and the other has Windows 7, and I was digging around and the partition with XP has the Boot folder, which is a problem because I need to remove the partition with XP on it. Thanks in advance.

 

Remove and do what with it?

generally speaking, if you have your Win7 dvd on hand, you can remove the xp partition from within Win7, then reboot with the Win7 dvd and choose startup repair

However, before you do that you need to know what you are going to be doing beyond just "removing the partition"

 

Copy the boot the folder to windows 7 partition and set it to active. I am not sure it will work though.

 

Using the commmands "fixboot" and "fixmbr"?

 

I can't delete the Windows XP partition, I've used 7's disk management and I've used a 3rd party program but nothing will let me delete the partition all together.

 

Probably because it is still boot partition.

 

I tried that, and the guy above is right it is the boot partition, so how to transfer it to Windows 7?

 

I think you can shrink that partition to a smaller size.

 

Can't you disable flags, or just format the partition?

 

It won't let me touch the partition, and maby I can try shrinking it till it goes over the boot folder then via the Windows 7 disc, delete the partition all together then fix the boot.

 

Have you tried Gparted live CD or EASUS partion managers. Gparted is free and should get the job done.

 

WAIT A SECOND--NEW WRINKLE--GETTING A WINDOWS NOT LEGITIMATE ERROR

Just because I am a little crazy, sometimes, I grabbed an old PC that was sitting around, installed XP, installed Win7 and then wiped the XP.


I actually farted around with this for a while trying to do it with only a Win7 disc, but ran out of patience so we're going to use a third party tool. (I did, however, discover that Win7 repair tool will actually undelete a parititon...didn't expect that.)

Anyway, as LIVEFRMNY notes, download and run a gparted live cd, wipe the xp paritition, then expand the Win7 partition into the vacant space then apply (don't forget to apply!)

Gpartd will do its thing, takes about 10 minutes because it first must delete the partition, expand the partition, then check it's work.

Quit gparted, drop in your Windows 7 dvd. Boot from the DVD and choose REPAIR from the lower left hand corner.

You will get uthe startup menu. Choose the top option and have it search for your Windows 7 install, and click REPAIR STARTUP.

Reboot.

Now, in my case, I actually had to run REPAIR STARTUP a second time. I suspect the first repair set the new partion active, afterwhich, I got a bootmgr is missing, and the second repair fixed the bootmgr.


I tried to do all of this from the Win 7 command line, but ran out of patience (you can delete the xp partition easily enough, but you cannot repair the bootmgr....I am pretty sure you can do this, but I was tired of messing around and I'm sure you just want to get it done), so you're going to have to do it this way (using gparted).

 

Originally I just wanted to shrink the partition but when I couldn't I just wanted to delete it, but this is the weirdest thing ever, first what I did was use the Windows 7 disk and go into the instillation part until it gave me the option to choose which partition to install on, so instead of installing it, it actually let me "delete the partition" so I turned my PC off and loaded up Windows 7 and used a 3rd party program and it let me resize it finally, before I couldn't even touch it, so I resized it and turned off my pc and loaded up the Windows 7 repair and repaired the boot things (just in case) and now XP is on a 10gb partition and windows 7 has the rest of the 466gb. Who knew...

To the guy above - I figured that on my own but thank you. I really didn't have to do that but for some reason I had to.

 

So, the partition still exists, but it smaller, and windows 7 has more space, but you still have the same issue, right? Is XP still bootable?

As for this system I was farting around with it is irrevokably borked

 

No I'm not having any issues anymore, and yes it's bootable.