Remove XP from second hard drive

[PCPower90000]

When I built my computer a year ago I installed a new western digital hard drive and my old seagate hard drive in the same system in order to get more disk space on the old hard drive.

I installed Vista 64 the western digital(labeled C and configured it to be the primary boot disk. On the old seagate(labeled D from my old PC I had XP. I have never booted up or selected the XP seagate hard drive only the vista 64 western digital hard disk. I have accessed some of the files on

Now when I go into Computer Management in Vista 64 it has the following

Volume Layout Type File System Status
C: Simple Basic NTFS Healthly(System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
D: Simple Basic NTFS Healthly(Active, Primary Partition)

I looks like I may have unknowingly created a dual boot system so now do I have to deal with a boot.ini or can I just follow these instructions?

http://www.syschat.com/remove-xp-xp-vista-dual-boot-1927.html

 

[PCPower90000]

I read in the Vista 64 help file that if it were a dual boot system then both drives would be labeled boot partitions but it also says if a partition is labeled an active partition then the computer will use the loader on that partition to start the operating system. So would I still completely destroy my system by formatting or repartitioning the D: drive?

 

[aford10]

You can format the D drive with no problem. Check your boot.ini file to see if the 2nd drive is even listed. Under operating system, you should have only 1 listed.

 

[PCPower90000]

I think Vista has a BCD store now and not a boot.ini but if I hit F6 at start up the windows boot manager comes up and there is only Vista is listed. I am still going to use the vista backup utility to backup the computer to an external hd before I try to format it.

 

[aford10]

Correct. It's not the boot.ini anymore. It's a new look, with some new features, same concept.