Remove a second OS from computer setup and config

[poseiden79]

I am stuck in an interesting situation with my computer.  About three months ago I made an upgrade on my system from Vista to Windows 7.  At the time when I did it, I did not do an over the top install of Windows 7 on my hard drive that has Vista installed on it.  I installed Windows 7 to another new hard drive in my system. 

So when my system boots I have the ability to boot to either OS.  I have Norton Ghost 15.0 on my system for doing backups. I want to now fully get rid of the Vista hard drive and reformat the drive.  For some reason I cannot reformat the drive from within Windows.  Another thing, when I try to specify the type of backup job I want Ghost to do for my main Windows 7 drive, it keeps telling me that I have to include a backup of the drive that has Vista installed on it, otherwise if I have to restore my Windows 7 drive it might not work correctly. 

So how do I go about removing any attachment issues of Vista from my Windows 7 drive so that I can now delete and reformat the drive?  Attached is a screen shot of my HDD setup just in case.  Any ideas what I need to do to solve this? 

[Saving space, attachment deleted by admin]

[drivenbywhat]

What OS are you in when you try to format the vista drive? Tell me it's win7 because if you're trying to format the vista drive from vista itself then we have bigger problems to deal with, lol. The other issue here is the boot sector. It is located in your vista drive. Yes, I know it doesn't say "boot" in the picture next to the vista drive. Windows mixes up the term system with boot. If you were to achieve formatting the drive you will have issues booting into win7 because you would wipe the boot info that tells the pc which drive to boot from first which in turn tells it which drive has what OS. This is seen in the "active" word next to the vista drive. As far as ghost goes, it may be telling you the message to include vista for the reasons I've already stated or because vista is where you installed it.

So that you know the pitfalls of succeeding with formatting the drive here's the answer to your question. Search for "darik's boot and nuke". It's a program that wipes hard drives. This will wipe your vista drive and then you'll have to format it to get windows to see it again. Win7 should have a backup feature to backup the whole drive. I would use this to replace ghost before wiping vista. Then after you've wiped vista and have the problems of booting into the right drive, I would use the win7 disc to boot into the recovery tools and possibly use the "startup repair" tool to possibly fix the boot issue. Good luck.

[Veltas]

What OS are you in when you try to format the vista drive? Tell me it's win7 because if you're trying to format the vista drive from vista itself then we have bigger problems to deal with, lol. The other issue here is the boot sector. It is located in your vista drive. Yes, I know it doesn't say "boot" in the picture next to the vista drive. Windows mixes up the term system with boot. If you were to achieve formatting the drive you will have issues booting into win7 because you would wipe the boot info that tells the pc which drive to boot from first which in turn tells it which drive has what OS. This is seen in the "active" word next to the vista drive. As far as ghost goes, it may be telling you the message to include vista for the reasons I've already stated or because vista is where you installed it.

So that you know the pitfalls of succeeding with formatting the drive here's the answer to your question. Search for "darik's boot and nuke". It's a program that wipes hard drives. This will wipe your vista drive and then you'll have to format it to get windows to see it again. Win7 should have a backup feature to backup the whole drive. I would use this to replace ghost before wiping vista. Then after you've wiped vista and have the problems of booting into the right drive, I would use the win7 disc to boot into the recovery tools and possibly use the "startup repair" tool to possibly fix the boot issue. Good luck.

Window style suggests it's Windows 7 to me, there's a slight difference in the size of the caption buttons.

[poseiden79]

Yes I am in Windows 7 when doing everything I mentioned above.  I will work on ideas presented above and then I will get back with the results of what happened.  Hopefully I have no adverse issues and can manage this without having to re-ghost my drives after I make the changes.  Thanks for the ideas.

[Geek-9pm]

 Vista is taking up space on your computer and you want to get rid of it. That's understandable, but in a few cases you might want to have theOS in your computer anyway.
Please allow me to share my practical experience. My computer is a multiboot computer and I have finally decided not to bother removing systems I don't use. Nowadays hard drives are cheap, at least the common IDE drives. I normally have two drives installed in my system and I believe the poor performance is a little bit better than when I had just one drive. My power supply has more than enough power to supply my hard drives and my graphics card. So I see no point in removing one of the drives. As for drive space, Windows Vista is a hog, but it can reduce down to about 10 GB. One of my drives is a 250 GB drive, so I did not bother to remove the stuff from the system.
My reasoning for this is because in times past I have tried to move my operating systems from one place to another and repair the system and it was just a big hassle and then I would have some doubt as to what about the system would be reliable after doing so many changes and mutations to it.

Now for the theoretical problem. It may be that many users don't understand that once you install an operating system in a certain configuration it can be very hard to change it. With regard to how the system boots up.

If you wish to have just Windows 7 as the operating system, you would need to do a repair of Windows 7 so that it will boot by itself and not depend on the other operating system to do this start up. As for myself, I have done that and I don't like it. I prefer to do a fresh install rather than try to do a repair. But in my case, it is my practice to have backups of everything and that makes it easier to do a clean install been rather than trying to repair a defective install.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. Of course it really is possible just to repair the window seven installation and it is quite a learning experience and it may work out well for you. But just in case, be sure you have some kind of backup of any thing that is important to you.

Please excuse spelling and grammar errors, a I have limited ability to proofread my own stuff. This is from speech dictation.

[drivenbywhat]

Another thing I just thought of is the following:

Do you have an external usb drive kit? You could remove the vista drive from your pc and put in the kit. Then attach the usb drive to the pc and you should be able to format it.

Also, to help you see the "boot error" I referred to you can do a simple test to see it. Unplug the vista drive from your pc. Turn the pc on and you should see the error that you will get when you format vista. Now turn your pc off and plug the drive back in. You should be able to boot again. In case you can't then use the vista/7 disc to boot to the recovery tools and use the startup repair tool.