Removing Vista from dual boot of Win 7 and vista

[soro333]

I had recently installed windows 7 on my laptop running windows vista. I did not remove the existing windows vista installation, and thus win 7 was installed in a dual boot combination. Now, i want to remove vista from my laptop and use windows 7 only.

The problem is that during installation, win 7 was installed on logical drive and windows vista was on the primary drive. Thus, i cannot delete/format the windows vista partition. Also I cannot transfer the boot drive to the partition containing win 7 because the vista partition is the active one.

Please help.

 

[Hawkeye22]

This may help. i found it on a different forum.

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/15546-remove-windows-vista-dual-boot-system.html

 

[WyomingKnott]

But the problem is that the only bootable partition is the Vista partition that you want to scratch.

Always back it up as an image first, just in case.

Simplest solution is to convert said logical partition to a primary partition, then do a Win7 repair installation. From the same site that Hawkeye22 used (a fantastic resource, by the way), http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/25603-install-win7-logical-partition.html .

Something similar here: http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/125364-delete-xp-dual-boot.html

Or just take an image backup of your Win7 partition and restore it to a nice new primary partition, maybe the one that Vista used to be in.

Something interesting to try, IF you have a full image backup of the disk, would be to reformat the Vista partition and then try a Win7 repair install while the Win7 partition is still logical. I doubt that it would work, but why not give it a whirl?

Finally, the classic option: Save your data externally, reformat your drive, and do a clean Win7 install.

Do any of these capture your fancy?

Edit: I'm willing to bet that this could be done while leaving the Win7 on the logical partition, by using a third party boot manager. Make a teeny-tiny active partition for said boot manager. But I'm not familiar with this type of software.

 

[soro333]

Thanks for the replies, i'm gonna download the bootable partition manager cd i found on the links you gave and gonna mark my win 7 partition as active and then use the win 7 dvd to repaair the startup.

Hope all works out well O

 

[WyomingKnott]

I think that you can't mark a logical partition, or the extended partition that contains it, as active. Let us know what happens.

 

[soro333]

I dug a little deeper in the links mentioned earlier and found a program

http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html

I burned a cd, booted from it, and the gui let me edit, format and change my logical windows 7 partition to primary drive.

Thanks everyone !

 

[soro333]

Now the dvd drive doesnt work !