Trying to remove Windows from my boot disk…?

Question

I had Windows XP installed happily on my C drive until I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 via an upgrade to Windows Vista.

However, something went wrong on the second step with the install to Windows 7. I ran out of hard disk space on C: towards the end of the upgrade. Windows tried to recover Windows Vista but this step failed as well leaving me somewhere in limbo between the two.

Unsure if it was a wise move or not, I did a fresh install of Windows 7 into a new partition on the same disk as my C drive.

Now, I have two installs of Windows 7 on my computer when I boot. One is fine, the one in the new partition...now D drive; the other is still in limbo. I can access files on the drive fine but booting to it doesn't work...I'm left with a command prompt to an X drive which is created by the Windows Setup program.

I would like to remove the install of Windows 7 that doesn't work and reclaim that disk space.

Problem is, 'Disk Management' tells me its attributes are (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump and Partition). One of these attributes is stopping me from removing the partition.

I am running a RAID over two other disks that I believe is configured with drivers etc from the C drive.

What can I do to remove Windows from the unused partition...?

Can I recover that install of Windows and remove the new install that works...?

Bit lost...!

Answer 1

You might try this: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?p=1709 to change your bootloader
I would suggest that you stick to the windows version that is functionnal and remove the non working one (after bootloader modifications - meaning removing d:\windows d:\Program files d:\Documents and settings)
Best of all: save your datas (even from the Documents and Settings folder) and restart a fresh install after formatting disk. This would avoid files on the C drive referencing the OS on the D drive.
Good luck.