Sunday 27 October 2019

windows 7 - Removing old Vista partition, but it's the active, system partition


I originally had Vista installed on my laptop and installed Win7 as a dual boot option. Now I've moved everything from Vista, I have removed the dual boot option via msconfig.exe. Finally, I want to remove the Vista partition (and then extend the Win7 partition to reclaim the disk space).


So, in Win7, I see a C: drive for the Win7 partition and D: which is the Vista partition. But the Vista partition is the active, system partition which, after some investigation means it has the boot loader info and if this was deleted, would mean Win7 would no longer boot.


The question is, therefore, how can I safely delete the Vista partition? Can I somehow move the boot loader from D: to C:?


Some suggestions I've seen say to boot from the Win7 dvd, format the Vista partition. A reboot will fail, so boot from the Win7 dvd again performing an automatic startup repair. Is this the safest way forward? (I know this kind of stuff is inherently risky, but looking for the best approach before hosing my PC and having to go through the whole setup process again!)



Answer



I would do what you said in the last part.


There are ways by copying the bootloader / system files then marking as active e.t.c. but it can take time and can get complicated


By far the easiest way is simply to delete the other partition and mark your new one as active then put in the DVD and allow it to repair the startup for you.


(of course, this will fail and you can have a lot of problems if you use Bitlocker on your drive... Assuming you don't!)


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