My main operating system (on c: drive) is windows XP. i installed windows 7, on a partition but now need to remove it because i am running out of hdd space (only 111gb ). I cannot figure out how to change the windows 7 boot.ini file. what i think i have to do is modify windows 7's boot.ini , then format the partition and merge the free space into the main partition (the one with XP).
i have windows 7 rc1 32bit dual booted with windows vista home premium 32bit. I want to remove windows 7 safely without the chance of breaking my vista. Can someone please tell me what the best way is?
I have a dual boot system (Win7 &XP). I have had to recover the boot files for Win7 in the past. Now the boot screen shows a choice between 'earlier version of windows' and 'Windows 7 (recovered)'. how to remove the word 'recovered' from the Win 7 description?
Tried tackling this one single-handedly to begin with and failed.
I have Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installed as a dual boot, different partitions single HDD.
I want to remove the Windows 7 partition and keep the Win 2008. I do NOT want to lose anything from the Win 2008 partition. Taken from Disk Management.
Disk 3 with 5 partitions 1st - Healthy, Primary partition 73MB. (I thought this was system reserve but its not, leftover space from a previous partition change). It's currently mounted and completely empty. 2nd - Unallocated space 500mb 3rd - Windows 7 OS (Healthy - system, active, primary partition) 4th - Windows 2008 Server OS (Healthy - boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition) 5th - Unallocated space 8mb'ish
I haven't been using Windows 7 for years and want to clean this drives partitions up because it's messy and wasting space. I just need windows server 2008 as it's been used as a server for years and that's all I need it for now.
I want to safely remove the windows 7 installation and merge that partition along with the 1st and unallocated spaces back into a single partition where windows 2008 server resides.
Now I've tried tackling this myself and failed. I stupidly made the windows server 2008 partition as active which killed my boot and took me forever to repair with zero loss fortunately. Sadly it was as simple as using diskpart in a command prompt from win 2008 boot disk to make win 7 partition active again.
So, how do I do this? The boot manager must be on the win 7 partition as removing active killed it. The windows 7 boot (during startup) is long removed, system boots directly to windows 2008.
A few months ago, I set up my computer to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. It worked fine. Now I rarely use Ubuntu, and I would like to remove it. I would like to know all of the steps I would need to go through to do this. I have a large partition for winows 7, its recovery partition, then i have one partition for Ubuntu.
my problem is that now i have two operating systems:
1)XP Sp2
2)Linux Fedora
now my boot loader is GRUB and with that i select which of them start,the default is windows Xp, now i want to delete linux and just have windows xp and then install windows 7.
so i think i shoud first change bootloader and then install windows7,but i don't know how to do this this.can u plz help me?
another thing where can i see windows7 requirements,and the file system for installing it shoud be NTFS is it right?
at least how many GBs shoud i have for installing it?
All I have a dual boot Win 7 and XP, I want to remove the XP as I no longer use it. Both are active and on seperate discs, can I just format the disc? I have used easy BCD to edit the boot menu so only Windows 7 default yes.
I have windows 7 and Vista installed, both ultimate and 64bit.
they are install on 2 seperate physical drives.
Vista was installed first about a year or so ago. i added a new drive and put windows 7 on it. i would like to remove the vista all together as i am happy with windows 7.
in disk manager when i look at both the drives they are showing up and both being active and primary. but the Windows 7 is showing as the boot drive. i am not able to format the vista drive. the only options that are not greyed out are change drive letter and shrink volume.
I have been doing some research and i have tried this option
bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force
i have done it remotely and if it worked it should have rebooted the system and i should be able to remote to the system. i am unable to reach it now until i get home.
my question is why am i unable to format the vista drive in Windows 7 and have i just screwed up my bootloader?
I recently did an install of Windows 7 (a clean install) and accidenlty selected to dual boot somehow (I chose to install 7 on the D drive instead of C, where Vista is installed)
I have 2 hard drives with XP installed on 1 and then i installed windows 7 on the other. On bootup i get the option to select the operating systems.
Now i want to only have windows 7 and remove XP completely so that i can format the hard drive with xp on and use as backup.
The problem is that when i switch boot sequence to boot off the win 7 hdd first, i get BOOTMGR is missing. I have tried the startup repair from the win 7 cd but it also fails with an error saying Missing boot manager.
If i switch back to use XP hdd as 1st boot device, i get the OS options screen again and can boot into both without issue.
Does anyone have any idea of how i can get rid of XP and boot with only windows 7 as first boot device?
I made a dual boot system about a month and a half ago and I now no longer have need of Windows XP. Windows 7 is my primary OS, so how do I go about removing the XP partition?
Hope someone here can point me in the right direction. I currently have a dual boot machine. Win7 and Vista. I bought the machine with Vista and shortly after 7 came out. So I installed 7 and never looked back at Vista. I want to delete the Vista partition so I can regain space on the drive but it wont let me. It's an active primary partition. Even though I am logged into 7 it says that I can't delete a primary partition.
I have recently "tried" a Linux .ISO CD and took the wrong option and partially installed ubuntu as a dual boot option. Since that time I have discovered Oracle VirtualBox and much prefer this route to look at and experiment with linux. However I have a legacy of my untutored fiddling in the form of a splash screen at power up [straight after POST] of a dual boot option - Windows 7 or ubuntu p which I dont want. Its an annoyance rather than a catastrophy but I am at a loss as what/how to 'edit' this startup file to remove the dual bootup option. I have tried FIXMBR from the repair option but the dual selection option remains.
I am dual booting Vista and Windows7 RC 7100. They are both on the same Hard Drive on different partitions. I have made the decision to stick with the new OS (Windows7) and give Vista the boot. So I want to get rid of the extra partition and revert to a single OS (Windows7).
I don't want to reformat the whole hard drive and completely re-install the windows7 operating system. I want to remove Vista from the dual boot menu and keep windows7. Then I want to format the Vista Partition. How can I do this and keep my present installation of Windows7 without having to reinstall Windows7?
1st. Installed XP on IDE drive, 2nd. installed a Sata drive, installed Windows 7 on that drive, want to remove the IDE drive, is it as simple as disconnecting the XP drive and do a startup repair, or is there going to be an issue with the XP drive being the Active drive, will startup repair make the Sata drive the Active drive?
I have two drives (C and D) with Vista on one and Win 7 on the other (not sure if they're actual drives or partitions of a single drive, how do I tell?). I am dual booting and never use Vista. Starting to need the disk space and want to delete Vista. Is this difficult in this scenario?
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
I installed Windows 7 on a partitioned harddrive with vista on the other half. After the installation i have my boot menu with:Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows vista still works but when i try and load windows 7 i get a boot error message
I have dual boot with Xp and windows 7.when i log into my Xp all the restore points being deleted from windows 7.when i check the disk management information in 7 it shows windows 7 create a logical drive with my Xp primary drive.even i am hide the drive from both windows means Xp drive from windows 7 and vice verse.So i like to unmount or remove the drive partition of windows 7 from Xp and Xp primary from windows 7.So that they dont affect each others system files with being deleted the partitions.
I installed opensuse 12.1 on dual boot along with my other windows 7 installation. Installation of opensuse is successful and i can use it. But when I tried to use windows 7 on grub, it says bootmgr is missing. I've already encountered this problem a long time ago so i tried to use bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot in the recovery console in the windows 7 DVD. Rebuildbcd and fixboot did not work and it said something like it cannot find my windows installation. I also tried bootrec /scanos, it returned a windows installation on D:\Windows but my windows is in drive C. I think this has something to do with me messing up the active partition in disk management a month ago but i already fixed it by setting the active partition to the system reserved partition. Only fixmbr is successful, but now i can't boot on any OS because it says: Missing operating system.I also tried bcdboot C:\Windows but it failed with a message that goes like: Failure when attempting to copy boot information..
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
I have installed a year before UBUNTU on my pc with dual boot (i.e. use either window 7 or ubuntu).the NTFS partition that contains the UBUNTU was corrupted and i wanted to take the dual boot from my PC. I used the instructions from the web site: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...t-environment/but the disk management tool would not let me delete the NTFS partition.Could any one help me delete the NTFS partition and use just windows 7 as the only boot. step by step help would be great.
I got windows 7 running fine for a while now and ever since my XP did not boot anymore.I was not worried to much about it since i did not need it at the time.But now i really REALY need it,See i got all my Cubase projects in there and my cubase plug-ins al setup in XP and i need to get to the projects?At first it did not do anything and using easyBCD did not help either.I cpoied ntldr and detect to the root of C: wich contains my XP and now it shows the bootscreen but hangs on a black screen.The thing is right before the bootscreen shows i see the text" invalid boot.ini" flashing by very quick.I am able to enter that winXP install in safe mode and i tried safe/vga mode as well wich works but thats all.
I have a laptop I bought a year ago on which a created a dual boot Win 7 (32bit)/Win XP SP3 install, each on a separate partition. It was my first Win 7/XP dual boot install, and my first personal system that I allowed to have a Win 7 install on it at all, so although I have plenty of experience working on pretty much every previous version of Windows, I have very little experience with Win 7 and dual boot configs.
Today about 2 hours ago my audio spontaneously stopped worked for no good reason, so after shutting down each program to see if that cured it (which it didn't), I restarted the system. Out of the blue, for the first time I've ever experienced it, I received the msg "MBR Error 1" - Press any key to boot from floppy. I don't have a floppy of course on my laptop, and if I press any key I simply get the same msg. I turned the system off for a few minutes to make sure it was a good cold boot, but every time I still get the same msg. I tried switching the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI (IDE is required for XP to boot, AHCI required for Win 7), but I still get the same error msg before I'm even prompted with the OS boot selection, so it made no difference of course.
I looked up this issue and found various suggestions, but none of the ones I found took into consideration a dual boot config., they were all Win 7 specific solutions. I don't what to try and repair the MBR only to have it screw up my dual boot config and be unable to access XP, which is what I use almost exclusively, nor do i want to lose access to Win 7 if at all possible.
I had a backup HD of my complete system that I saved several months ago when I upgraded my HD, and I periodically refresh the most important files on it, so I'm currently running on the laptop in question using my old HD, and it's working just fine. Worst case I can just clone my old HD to my newer HD that's screwed up, but I'll still lose a lot of changes I've made to the OS since I upgraded the HD and have to reinstall and config a number of programs, so that's my last option. I'll also have to back up about 200GB of data from the newer HD which is much larger than my old HD, and then restore it back after the clone, something that will take a lot of time and unncessary effort if I can just fix the MBR.
I had Win XP on 1 HDD & installed Win 7 on a different HDD. I think I accidentally did a dual boot install because Win 7 won't boot without the the XP disk connected to the motherboard.
That was fine until my XP drive died yesterday. Now Win 7 won't boot. The first time I tried to repair, Win 7 was not even seen. so I booted into diskpart and made the partition active. Now it could be seen as an OS.
Then I did a startup repair. It did whatever it does & when it was finished I restarted the pc but it didn't boot I went back to diskpart and confirmed the partition was active. I went back startup repair and tried again.
This time it said it could not detect a problem, but it still will not boot. What else can I do? My pc is homebuilt. Right now I have the 1 sata drive, 2.53 ghz cpu, 4gb ram, onboard video & sound
As currently configured, XP is on drive C:, Win 7 was added to drive E:, and the system is currently run as a dual boot. Attempting to boot without the XP drive present will yield a "NTLDR is missing" error very early in the boot process.
I have already tried the following:
(1) I moved the hidden Windows Boot Manager files (bootmgr as well as the associated Boot folder) from the XP drive root to the Win 7 drive root.
(2) After physically removing the XP drive, I rebooted to the Win 7 installation DVD, and used the "Repair Your Computer" option to pull up the "Recovery Tools". Then, using the command prompt utility, ...
(3) I attempted to write a new boot sector to the Windows 7 disk using the command: Bootrec /fixboot, - that yields an error though. The Bootrec /fixmbr claimed success, but ultimately did not make Win 7 drive bootable.
I had to reconnect drive C: just to boot into Win 7 again to write this. I do have files backed up, but to format and reinstall files would take many hours beyond just the time to transfer 400 GB of data, since I have dozens of purchased applications that need to be freshly reinstalled and validated as well. Basically I want my E: drive now to be my boot drive while the C: drive is reformatted and used for general storage.
Any idea how to make my Win 7 drive bootable? Do I need a partition program that is more adept at creating a viable boot sector, or is that even the problem?
I installed Windows 7 32bt profesional on the D: partition on an XP machine (C. Dual boot worked fine, but since I had to reinstall XP I have lost the option to change partitions at boot.I want XP to be the default but with Win 7 to an option at boot.My boot.ini is currently:[CODE]