Removal of XP from dual boot with Win7

David:

You might be able to do this with the tools built into Windows 7. How many partitions are on your disk? Do you know which partition the system boots from? Posting a screenshot from Windows 7 Disk Management would be most helpful.

Hi,
Only just seen this as I didn't get an email notification for some reason.

I will attempt to attach a screenshot of the drive manager screen.
As I said, I have only used Windows 7 since cloning off the XP partition to another machine so this is the Windows 7 layout.
Disk C is the Win7 boot partition and is the second partition on the drive. Disk F is the XP boot partition and the first partition on the drive. Drives D and E are on seperate physical drives so not relevant.
If I booted to XP then the C disk would be the first partition on the drive and the XP system drive, obviously, and the Win7 boot partition becomes disk F - but I can't really boot to XP now that I have an identical machine using that name and identity. The domain controller would throw a wobbly!

Obviously I also have a similar problem on the seperate XP clone version of the machine which still asks if I want to boot Win7 at startup despite there being no Win7 partition on that drive.

Thanks for any help

David

David:

If you installed Windows XP first and Windows 7 later then the Windows 7 installer would have put its boot files on the first (XP) partition. Your system boots from this partition, which you tell because this is the Active partition.

You can do what you want to do and delete the first partition and enlarge the second partition to fill the entire disk, but it's somewhat more involved because the system boots from the partition that you want to delete. Partition management software like Acronis Disk Director will be needed to do this.

The absolute simplest way to do this is to rely on the Windows 7 installation DVD and its automatic repair capability. You would basically do the following:

1. Boot your PC from the partition management software's bootable CD
2. Delete the first (XP) partition
3. Enlarge (or resize) the second (W7) partition from the left side to fill the disk
4. Allow the operation to complete, which may take some time to move all of the sectors in the second partition to the beginning of the disk. You will now have only a single (W7) partition.
5. Make the single (W7) partition Active

At this point the PC will not boot because the files needed to boot into Windows 7 were deleted in step 2. You would now need to boot the PC from the Windows 7 installation DVD (or the repair CD if you have made one from within Windows 7). Allow the automatic repair to run. You will probably need to repeat the automatic repair at least 3 times before it has fixed all of the issues and the PC boots into Windows 7 properly, since it seems to only fix one thing at a time.

There are other ways to do this; if you're interested in a manual procedure, try this one from one of the other Acronis forum MVPs: http://www.themudcrab.com/separatevistaxp.php. Note that this article was written for XP and Vista dual-boot systems but the procedure for XP and Windows 7 dual boot systems is identical since Vista and W7 use the exact same method of booting. In your case you can skip part 4 - fixing XP - because you are going to eventually delete the XP partition. When finished and when booted into Windows 7, use Windows Disk Management console to delete the first (XP) partition and then use partitioning software as described above to enlarge the W7 partition to fill the disk. If you have followed the procedure in the article then automatic repair should not be needed.

On your cloned disk where you want to keep XP, follow step 4 in the article for fixing XP then use partition management software to delete the Windows 7 partition from this disk and enlarge the XP partition to fill the entire disk.

If you have Acronis True Image or other imaging software it is highly recommended that you save an image of the disk before doing any of the above steps in case something goes wrong and you need to recover.

Hi,
Thanks very much for this which I have finally got around to doing.

The removal of the Boot Manager and deletion of the old partitions worked fine and now my Windows 7 machine boots straight to 7 and my XP machine boots straight to XP. This make my life a lot easier!

The problem which I am left with now is on the Windows 7 machine: I cannot resize the partition to fill the rest of the disk. The Windows XP partition was the first on the drive and this is now gone, leaving unallocated space.

Using Windows disk manager dpes not give me the option to extend the Windows 7 partition - it is greyed out.

Looking at Acronis products, I have True Image (2012 I think) but this doesn't do that, and Disk Director Server 10 but this doesn't work with Windows 7. So I'm looking at Disk Director Home 11 which SAYS that it will do this in the blurb on the Acronis website. I have loaded on the demo which says that it can't do this in the demo version, but on checking the manual it says it can't do this ANYWAY on the system volume, boot volume or active volume!

So why does the marketing material NOT SAY that it cannot do this? I very nearly just bought it and that would have been money wasted!

So how the heck am I supposed to achieve this? Can I stick this drive into the old machine running XP and resize the partition from there using my old Disk Director Server 10 or is it unable to talk to Windows 7 partitions at all? Or can I use True Image Home 2012 to clone the Win7 partition into the empty space at the front of the disk? I suppose ultimately I could just clone it onto another drive but I'd rather not do that if it can be helped.

Advice much appreciated.

Thank you!

David

David:

Partitioning software that is running in Windows cannot change the Windows partitions while Windows is running. These operations have to be done when Windows is shut down, so the programs provide bootable media to accomplish this.

Yes, Disk Director 11 can do what you want. You would boot your machine from the DD 11 bootable media and first move the Windows 7 partition to the beginning of the disk, then resize it to fill to the end of the disk. I would not do this with DD 10 because it does not understand the new partitioning offset rules used by Windows 7.

However, if you have TI2012 you should be able to use it to accomplish the same thing. TI 2012 contains some of the code needed to relocate and resize partitions when restoring. Here's the procedure. First create an image of the Windows 7 partition and save to a convenient storage medium like a USB external disk. Then boot the machine to the TI bootable media and restore only the Windows 7 partition. When setting up the restore, switch to partiton mode (not disk mode) and choose to resize the partition so that it starts at the beginning of the disk and fills the entire disk. Refer to page 85 in the TI 2012 user guide, located here: http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/legacy.html. This section of the user guide describes recovery from the bootable media, and the example shown is titled "Recovering a disk with a hidden partition". You don't have a hidden partition, so ignore this. The rest of the example shows how to recover multiple partitions and how to resize and/or relocate them upon recovery. In your case, you have only one partition to recover, so go from there, restoring only the single partition.

As an alternative, TI 2012 has a utility for initializing and partitioning disks, described on page 186. After creating your image you could boot from the recovery CD and then use this utility to delete any existing partitions on the disk, leaving the entire disk as unallocated space. Then restore your image to the unallocated space on the now-blank disk, making sure that you resize it to fill the disk. Then restore MBR and Track 0 as a second operation before rebooting into Windows.

Thank you, Mark. I'm actually 75% of the way through an image backup of the newly configured Win7 partition so I'll have a look at that when it's done.

Thank you for your very informative help.

David

David:

Let me know how it goes. As a precaution, validate your image from the bootable media before restoring it. The reason is that TI will first delete the target partition before starting a restore, and if there are any bit errors in the image file then you have both a corrupted image file and a now-blank target disk. The validation will check the integrity of the image before making any changes to the target disk.

Hi Mark,

Thank you for all your help. That worked a treat, although I did have a slight sphyncter moment because I could not find any verification option in TI2012 from the recovery CD. I know this was in v11 as I'd used it, and recovered drives before using that version. It was probably just a blind spot on my behalf, but having verified it from Windows 7, I clenched my cheeks and pressed on with it! I really like the ability to stretch the partition to fill the drive or leave a space for another partition. Very slick.

I'm now in exactly the position I wanted to be, with two identical computers; one running Windows 7 using the full disk capacity and one running Windows XP using its full disk capacity with neither having the annoying boot selection screen.

And you saved me 20 Quid! :-)

Thank you

David

David:

Excellent outcome; glad that it worked well.