Removing the active partition in a dual boot setup

[kktk]

My single hard drive has 1 primary partition and 3 logical drives in the extended partition.

The primary partition had XP installed on it and is obviously the Active partition(got drive letter C).
I then installed 7 on one of the logical drives.(got drive letter D).

The boot loader(I am assuming) is probably on the Active partition.

I am trying to delete the primary partition as I dont need the XP any longer --to claim some space on the drive.

What's the easiest way to accomplish this?

[Midknyte]

You'll have to reload 7 if you want it to be on C:. Even if you remove the C: drive, 7 will still reference D:

[kktk]

Really?
I was thinking more along the lines of changing the boot.ini etc and then going through some way of changing the partition(active).

Just wasnt sure about the sequence of events.

[Steve R Jones]

Win 7 doesn't use the boot.ini file. The traditional Windows NT boot loader, Ntldr, is replaced by Windows Boot Manager (Bootmgr.exe) and a set of system-specific boot loaders.

[kktk]

yeah i read that as well....so there's no way to move that bootmgr?

[Midknyte]

You can try BCDEdit or EasyBCD, but that still won't resolve the fact that all drive references will be to D:. I.E. your Win7 install will not change to C:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2014/vista_using_bcdedit_boot_up_options_dual_boot_xp_p rof/

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

[kktk]

wont renaming the partition use a partition manager take care of that? -ie., changing drive letters etc?

[Steve R Jones]

Nope...You would need something to go through the bagillion Registry entries etc.....Actully - for the most part about 98% of things will run just fine as D drive.

[Midknyte]

You'll have to reload 7 if you want it to be on C:. Even if you remove the C: drive, 7 will still reference D:
your Win7 install will not change to C:

I thought I was clear about that. That is why I said to do a clean install in the first place.

[t34b4g5]

if the winxp is installed on the 1st partition and the window 7 on the 2nd ie

hd1 = winXP
hdb2 = win7
hdb3 =?

then you will only be able to format the winxp partition and not extend the win7 partition onto it.

If it was the other way around then yes you would be able to delete the winXP partition and the 3rd parition and just extend the win7 partition to utilize the whole drive if you wanted.

to do this you will need to back up all your data and delete all 3 partitions and re-install the OS of choice onto the 1 partition taking the whole drive if you wanted.

[BipolarBill]

The only thing that you can do is to shrink the boot partition after removing all Windows XP folders. Do not delete any of the loose files on the boot partition! Delete the folders only and do that in Windows 7. Make the boot partition as small as you can with this:

http://www.partition-tool.com/

You can edit the boot menu and remove the XP reference with this:

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

You can't delete the partition, but you can make it so small that it doesn't matter. That is what I would do.