Remove Win 7 / Win 7 RC Dual Boot

[wibadger]

Here's the background: I had Vista installed on the primary drive. I installed Win 7 RC on a second drive and successfully dual booted the two of them. I installed Win 7 (retail upgrade product) over Vista without any authorization issues. I now have a Win 7/Win 7 RC dual boot system.

I would like to remove the Win 7 RC install and get rid of the dual boot. From reading other posts, it seems I should be concerned about the location of the bootloader. This should be on the drive with the Win 7 install I'm keeping, since this is where Vista was.

So...is there a straightforward way to get this done? Heck, I don't even care if it's not straightforward - I just need help!

Thanks in advance.

 

[JackMDS]

Welcome to AnanadTech Forums.

You probably can use Acronis Disk Director10 to delete the second partition.

No matter what it is quit tricky so make sure that you backup the Good partion before you touch any thing.

 

[wibadger]

Thanks for the welcome. (Looooong time lurker.) If I simply use Disk Director to remove the partition, the system won't be confused by the apparent lack of second bootable OS?

 

[ViRGE]

There shouldn't be any issues. Your boot records are stored with your Vista->Win7 install since it came first, so deleting the Win7RC partition shouldn't have an impact. In the worst case scenario that your drive is keeping its boot records on the Win7RC drive, then running Startup Repair from the Win7 disc will quickly fix the issue.

The hardest part will be removing the boot record for Win7RC itself. You'll want something like EasyBCD to delete the entry for it, since Windows probably won't realize that the entry can be removed.