Removing XP

[Guest]

I would really like some advice. I have been running Windows XP professional
quite happily for some time on a dual processor computer to large hard
drives. A few weeks ago I installed Vista on a separate Dr. Recently, I have
managed to update all my programs and hardware so that Vista (business) is
working very well for me and I would be quite happy to removed XP from my
computer.
Since installing Vista in addition to XP I am presented with a choice at
boot up to either open "previous operating system" or "Vista" and have more
often than not chosen to boot into Vista [ which will occur automatically if
I did not choose XP].

I thought that all I would need to do would be to format my C Drive and that
my Q drive , on which Vista is installed would probably be renamed
automatically to C or something like that.
However, a knowledgeable friend of mine informed me that if I simply
formatted the C Dr on which XP is installed, my computer may not start at all
because the ini files[boot files] were probably on the C drive.
Does this mean that I had best leave things alone and continue working with
Vista as I have done whilst leaving the installation of XP completely alone
as it is?

Any opinions and/or advice would be sincerely appreciated.
I hope my explanation and comments have not been too confusing

 

[P. Di Stolfo]

Hello,

it's true that, as far as I know, Vista needs booting files from the old XP
partition.
Options on what you could do:
- Delete the booting entry, so that it seems as though Vista is the only
operating system:
http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79102
and the program http://www.vistabootpro.org
- Delete all but some files Vista needs on the XP partition:
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?forumID=133&threadID=261689&messageID=2570375

Hope this helps.
Greetings,
P. Di Stolfo

 

[Paul Randall]

Hopefully someone will jump in and tell me if I'm wrong.

I think you installed Vista on a partition whose drive letter was Q:. A
whole bunch of Vista's registry entries point to files on drive Q:. It
seems to me that if you do anything that changes the drive letter of this
partition, Vista will choke because so many things cannot be found on drive
Q:.

-Paul Randall

 

[Guest]

Your "friend" is correct; Paul Randall's post is correct; P. Di Stolfo's
url to delete XP files from a running Vista looks correct (haven't had to do
it, myself. Vista shouldn't let you delete any System Files affecting Vista.).
IF you want to reclaim the old space, then you could resize the former XP
partition to only its necessary size, see this page for free trial sotware:
(works great)

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

then use Vista to make another partition in the freed space for (whatever)
use.