partitioning help please... getting rid of xp

N

Nokturnal

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2006
Messages
139
Ok, I am pretty much satisfied with Vista home premium, so i have decided to do away with my windows xp installation. My dual boot system works fine, but i cant seem to get anything done with the built in disk manager on vista. As it turns out my D: drive, the one containing xp, is the primary partition (and thus my C: drive is my "extended" vista install); which im sure is the issue that is giving me problems. When i try to right-click on drive D: (xp install) it wont let me delete that partition in order to give up space to be given to vista. And when i right-click on my drive C: (vista install), the option to "extend" is grayed out. So what im really asking is how can i transfer the title of "primary" to my vista install so i can delete xp and free up space?

Here is a picture for reference:
 
It sounds like the drive wasn't partitioned correctly in the beginning, because in a dual boot system, you'd want both partitions to be primary, standalone partitions. You could give PartedMagic a try, but you may have to run a repair on the Vista partition when finished, in case it isn't bootable.
 
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think your going to be able to change the partition type (logical to primary...) Regardless, my advice would be to use PartedMagic as Deacon recommended to "delete" the other two partitions on the disk, and then extend your Vista partition to use the entire disk.
 
Ok, so i did some more research and i came up with the program called Acronis Disk Director 10. They said it can convert logical drives into primary ones. So this obviously got me excited. I used it for this purpose and this is what i came up with:



But the newly "primary'ed" partition cannot extend into the unpartitioned space i have. Is this because it is not the active one? when i try to set it as active i get a warning: "Only mark a partition as active if it contains a functioning operating system. If the partition lacks an operating system, making it active might cause your computer to stop working. Do you wish to continue?"

this is quite the warning. Im just too hesitant/under-educated on this matter to continue without some guidance. help?
 
Well if it does end up screwing up your system, you can always use the Vista install disk to repair your MBR and boot manager, so I think it's safe to continue.

If you do manage to screw things up by marking it as active, pop in your Vista install disk and boot from it. When the box comes up that says install Windows, there should be a link at the bottom of that window that says recovery/repair or something like that. Open up a command prompt and type:

Code: 
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot

I'm not so sure that just marking it as active will let you extend the partition though...I've only ever been able to extend partitions forward...this would be like extending it backwards since you need to pull the beginning of the partition back. I don't think it lets you do that...then again I've never had this issue so I may just be rambling.

Hope this helps!
 
yea you were right, making it active really didn't do much. but an option on my xp install became un-grayed. the delete partition option. If i delete that partition, does my vista system become the new main O\S that can be extended with unpartitioned space?
 
Hmm...possibly. I can't be entirely sure. Like I said though, if you do delete the XP partition, you can just run those commands in the recovery console and you should be able to boot again. If you can't end up resizing your Vista partition, you could just make an extra NTFS partition in addition to the Vista install for files/programs and etc.
 
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