How to uninstall vista dual boot

[Greg Hines]

Hi all,

I presently have XP X64 and Vista X64 dual booting on one HDD. The
partitions are all Primary Partitions and setup as follows:-

Partition 1 - System Partition containing XP Windows Directory and boot.ini
file.
Partition 2 - Data files for the XP OS.
Partition 3 - Boot Partition containing the Vista Windows Directory.
Partition 4 - Data files for the Vista OS.

How do I safely remove Partition 1 & 2 and therefore only have Vista
remaining?

TIA

Greg

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Doesn't matter how you remove the XP volumes, you'll have to do a startup
repair of the Vista installation by booting the disk and loading the
recovery console when you're done.

You can use a third party tool or simply boot into Vista and use disk
manager to remove the XP volumes. When you reboot, follow the steps here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Earle Horton]

You will have to make sure that Partition 3 is the "active" partition first.
The words "system" and "boot" partition are somewhat nebulous in this
respect. Active is what the BIOS looks for at boot time. If you installed
XP X64 first then I would tend to think that Partition 1 is active now, but
it is not necessarily so. Mark Partition 3 active in Control Panel,
Administrator Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management. Or use a DOS
boot disk with Fdisk on it. If it is already the active partition then you
are now ready to remove Partition 1 and Partition 2. If not then there is a
program called "bootsect" in the "boot" folder of the Vista install DVD.
You need to use this to put the Vista Boot Manager on Partition 3.
"Bootsect /?" should make it produce more or less intelligible instructions
for running it. You could otherwise use Windows Setup in repair mode to
make this installation of Vista bootable.

You may need to run bcdedit at some point, but I don't really think so. If
so you can find some articles on TechNet http://technet.microsoft.com.
There are also articles describing bootsect.exe.

Earle

 

[Greg Hines]

Thanks Earle and Rick, I'll try your suggestions.