Removing old system partition

Hi all,

I had to replace my system drive with a newer one because it was first
gen SATA and didn't boot every time. Stupidly, I did it in a brutal
manner and now I have the current system on C: and an older installation
on D: The bizarre thing is that according to Disk Manager, the partition
on D is labelled as "System, Active, Primary Partition", while C: is
"Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition". This means I
am worried about simply using Linux to reformat the D drive in case it
kills the working partition on C:. C works perfectly well and there's
been no activity on D: since November last year when in a panic I
reinstalled Vista onto C:. Is there anything I can do to remove D,
reformat the drive and reuse it for something else *without* also
destroying my C: partition?

B


--
BeeVee
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

C is your boot drive so you can do what you like with D. Just go into
Disk Management and delete any partitions on D, or let Linux do the job.

You would only have a problem if D was your boot drive, but you could
use startup repair to remedy that even if it was the boot drive.



On 02/06/2009 11:44, BeeVee wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I had to replace my system drive with a newer one because it was first
> gen SATA and didn't boot every time. Stupidly, I did it in a brutal
> manner and now I have the current system on C: and an older installation
> on D: The bizarre thing is that according to Disk Manager, the partition
> on D is labelled as "System, Active, Primary Partition", while C: is
> "Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition". This means I
> am worried about simply using Linux to reformat the D drive in case it
> kills the working partition on C:. C works perfectly well and there's
> been no activity on D: since November last year when in a panic I
> reinstalled Vista onto C:. Is there anything I can do to remove D,
> reformat the drive and reuse it for something else *without* also
> destroying my C: partition?
>
> B
>
>

Hi Dominic thanks, but I cannot delete the partition since it's listed
as "System" (through Windows in any case) and I wanted to be sure that I
wasn't going to kill the system.

B


--
BeeVee
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Try to disconnect your D drive and then boot up.
If your boot is a success you can then format it using the Linux CD.
peter

--
If you find a posting or message from me offensive,inappropriate
or disruptive,please ignore it.
If you dont know how to ignore a posting complain
to me and I will be only too happy to demonstrate :-)

"BeeVee" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> Hi Dominic thanks, but I cannot delete the partition since it's listed
> as "System" (through Windows in any case) and I wanted to be sure that I
> wasn't going to kill the system.
>
> B
>
>
> --
> BeeVee
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

Cool, yes. That would do it. What should I use to reformat the drive
completely? Windows won't even allow me to repartition the drive and
there's nothing on there I can't back up elsewhere, so I'd rather just
redo the whole thing as a single partition.

B


--
BeeVee
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

On Tue, 2 Jun 2009 11:44:07 +0100, BeeVee
<> wrote:

>
>Hi all,
>
>I had to replace my system drive with a newer one because it was first
>gen SATA and didn't boot every time. Stupidly, I did it in a brutal
>manner and now I have the current system on C: and an older installation
>on D: The bizarre thing is that according to Disk Manager, the partition
>on D is labelled as "System, Active, Primary Partition", while C: is
>"Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition". This means I
>am worried about simply using Linux to reformat the D drive in case it
>kills the working partition on C:. C works perfectly well and there's
>been no activity on D: since November last year when in a panic I
>reinstalled Vista onto C:. Is there anything I can do to remove D,
>reformat the drive and reuse it for something else *without* also
>destroying my C: partition?

You have to make the C: partition the System partition, which will
allow booting Vista without the D: drive. Disconnect the D: drive, and
make sure the Bios is set to boot from the C: drive. Then follow steps
2 through 15 at
<http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.vista.general/msg/e44fccdac924c871?hl=en&dmode=source>,
ignoring any references to Windows XP.

>
>B

How do I make the C: drive a System drive to enable me to disconnect the
physical drive with the d: and f: partitions on it? I tried booting from
my Vista DVD, but got very scary results back from the repair setup,
saying that one Windows installation was found on D: (which may be true,
but another should have been found on C:!) and that the name of the
partition was NewSys (which is the name of the C: drive! The old system
partition on D: is called OldSys). Conflicting info there. Also it was
mixing up the 40GB size of OldSys with the 350GB size of NewSys.

B
PS. I don't seem to be able to selectively delete text in the reply
fields on this forum, nor see my cursor so please excuse any typos.
Using Fx 3.0.10


--
BeeVee
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

No joy, there's a disconnect - bootsect is not found anywhere and
without it I cannot rebuild the bootloader so the C: drive will not boot
without the D: drive present. Up until 4AM this morning to ascertain
that! Also, my DVD drive is called X: in the command prompt window...

B


--
BeeVee
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

X: is a RAM drive.
Do the following to find the DVD drive:
X:\sources>d:
D:\>dir
D:\>e:
E:\>dir
E:\>f::
F:\dir
etc.

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009 09:45:43 +0100, BeeVee
<> wrote:

>
>No joy, there's a disconnect - bootsect is not found anywhere and
>without it I cannot rebuild the bootloader so the C: drive will not boot
>without the D: drive present. Up until 4AM this morning to ascertain
>that! Also, my DVD drive is called X: in the command prompt window...
>
>B

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 01:38:06 +0100, BeeVee
<> wrote:

>
>No joy. I followed the instructions to the letter (with one exception. I
>changed "bootsect /nt60 sys" to f:\boot\bootsect /nt60 d: since if I
>used sys it would just update the old partition. I get a boot menu now,
>but even if I boot from NewSys, OldSys is still listed as SYSTEM
>partition by Disk Manager.
>
>B
According to your original message,
C: is "Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition"
and
D is labelled as "System, Active, Primary Partition".

In my orignal reply to you, I told you to
"Disconnect the D: drive, and make sure the Bios is set to boot from
the C: drive."
If you had disconnected the D: drive as I told you to do, then
f:\boot\bootsect /nt60 d: should fail, since the drive and its old
System partition would not exist.

To summarize, what you want to do is FIRST remove the physical disk
drive containing the current System partition (D, and then go
through the steps to put the boot manager files on the new drive (C,
creating a new System partition.