Free way to delete a system partition?

Drez

So I have a 1 terabyte drive that I partitioned a couple dozen of moon cycles ago in twain. On one of these partitions I installed Windows XP. Eventually, I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on the other partition. The result is that the Windows XP partition is a system partition and the Windows 7 Home Premium partition is a boot partition.

I would now like to fold the Windows XP partition's space into the Windows 7 boot partition and I would like to do this by deleting the Windows XP partition. I have already backed up all the [strike]pornography[/strike] data I was storing on the Windows XP partition, so all that remains is to delete it.

To monkey around with all this, I've been using a rather nifty free program called EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition. However, it tells me that to delete a system partition, I must use a bootable CD. Sadly, the bootable CD is only creatable on the non-free version of EASEUS.

Anyone know what I can do?

Also, is it safe to do what I want to do?

Nakatomi2010

So, just to clarify, you installed Windows XP, and THEN you installed Windows 7?

Sorry, in retrospect I realize this makes me seem like an idiot. Allow me to explain.

If Windows 7 is the primary partition on the system you can actually use Windows 7 to delete the XP partition and then expand the partition over.

Allow me to explain. Do Start>diskmgmt.msc

Diskmgmt.msc is your Disk Management utility. Here we want to see which drive is considered the "important" drive. If it's the XP drive, then we'll need to stop, and honestly at this point your best bet to garauntee no bizarre issues would be to just reinstall both OSes. If the Windows 7 drive is the primary drive, then we can work with that.

Drez

Nakatomi2010 wrote: »

So, just to clarify, you installed Windows XP, and THEN you installed Windows 7?

Sorry, in retrospect I realize this makes me seem like an idiot. Allow me to explain.

If Windows 7 is the primary partition on the system you can actually use Windows 7 to delete the XP partition and then expand the partition over.

Allow me to explain. Do Start>diskmgmt.msc

Diskmgmt.msc is your Disk Management utility. Here we want to see which drive is considered the "important" drive. If it's the XP drive, then we'll need to stop, and honestly at this point your best bet to garauntee no bizarre issues would be to just reinstall both OSes. If the Windows 7 drive is the primary drive, then we can work with that.

I was actually in there before. What do you mean by "important"? Both my C: and drive are "primary" partitions (on the same 1TB physical drive).

Here, take a look:



The C: drive is my Windows 7 partition.
The drive is my Windows XP partition.

I don't know what the "Active" tag means there.

edit: By the way, I cannot delete the Windows XP partition in Disk Management. The option is grayed out. I can shrink the partition, but I can just do that in EASEUS too.

Nakatomi2010

Hmmm.

Active indicates that THAT'S the partition that's triggering the boot process. There is a way to "fix" this, but we'd have to break it in a manner which I don't recommend unless you have a Windows 7 disc and a change of underware.

Boot off the Windows 7 disk, choose the "Repair your computer" option in the lower left and then open a command prompt. Once the command prompt is open you'd type in the following.

Diskpart
Select Disk 0
List partition (We're looking for the one that is , so it should be a 240GB Partition)
Select Partition 1 (This is a guess, but looking at the drive it should be right)
Delete
Exit

Restart your computer

WORST case scenario in doing this is that you mess up your system's ability to boot. However, Windows 7 and Vista are very resiliant and typically can bounce back from a scenario like this pretty good. What I'm seeing in the picture however indicates that you shouldn't have that issue as the boot information is all stored on the Win 7 partition.

However, the fact that the drive has the "System" on it is what concerns me. On my system that's in a hidden 100mb partition that Windows created on install. This is the part that Windows would have to fix on it's own.

So, basically, we can delete it, but because that's where the system files are stored, you're going to roll the dice as to whether or not the system boots when done, and if it doesn't, whether or not Windows 7 is able to fix itself properly.

Honestly, if I wasn't installing SBS2011 on my virtual machine, I'd totally lab this out in my VM just cause you've made me curious as to what would happen.

Edit: Of course, while reading the above, keep in mind you're talking to a guy playing Operation on his gaming rig, swapping out SATA drives while the system is hot, trying not to unplug any important cables... And I say operation, cause if I put my hadns in the wrong place, cables start to rub up against fans. I'm a bit reckless, but some of that is because I've got good system level backups.

tofu

The active tag means that's the partition used to start your computer's OS

I would download a live Linux distro (like Ubuntu) and use that to delete your XP partition and then resize your 7 partition to the entire physical disk. You might be able to use your Windows disk to do this but I'm not sure if it has disk partioning utilities

You may also need to repair your master boot record (MBR) after, when only Windows 7 is installed. You can do that from your windows disk

Zeon

The windows 7 disc does have a disk partitioning program.

Drez

Thanks, guys. I'll boot up my Windows 7 disc first and see if that'll work. Failing that, I will try a linux distro with gparted or whatever.