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Windows 7/Vista boot and reformat question

Spike

Spike

Diamond Member
I installed 7 on a seperate HDD in my main pc but still had Vista installed on another drive. Even though I had planned on just chaning my boot HDD priority the system setup a dual boot so now I get a choice. Fast forward to today and I want Vista gone and that HDD space back. Here is how my drives are setup:

500GB (windows 7, single partition)
500GB (games, files, etc..., single parition)
500GB (Vista on 60GB partition, remaining space on another partition)

Basically I want to kill the Vista partition and incorporate that space into the other partition. I tried playing with the admin disk management tools (while running 7) but it would not let me delete an active partition, like the one Vista is on. I could shrink it, which I did, but I just ended up with some unallocated space and I can't expand the other partition to take over that space.

How do I do all this and not screw up my boot.ini or whatever it is that shows the dual boot option. About the only idea I have is starting the win 7 setup and having that kill and reformat that drive with Vista on it but I don't want to loose all those files on the other partition and I don't have anywhere else to store them.

Thanks for your help!
 
Accomplishing your planned task (offing Vista) will depend on which drive has the boot sector on it. If you reformat that drive, your computer won't boot.
I don't know where you put it. And without knowing that, I can't be much help.

When a computer posts, one of the things that happens is that the BIOS loads some code from the boot sector into memory and executes that code. That tells the OS where to find the files it needs to start the boot process. If you do away with the boot sector...no boot.
 
I think you want to use EasyBCD to move the partition the boot files are on. I have not tested this functionality of the program but I believe it can be done.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

The Vista/Win7 BCD boot stuff is way more complex than the boot.ini and harder to recover from if you delete the boot files. Plus Win7 will use a secondary partition just for the boot files.
 
Dang... this is sounding more complicated than I wanted it to be. Really I was just too lazy to make sure I got all the files off of the vista drive I wanted, otherwise I would have wiped it and started from scratch.

As for the boot files I have no idea where they are. One HDD has Vista on it and I assume it created boot files when I installed that. Now I have installed Windows 7 on a completely separate HDD but I don't know what it did with it's boot files. I suppose I can unplug the vista drive (if I can find it, they are all the exact same Seagate model) and see if the pc can boot. If it gives me a system disk error I guess I could assume the boot files are on the other drive.
 
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