Musical Operating Systems (Change Boot Partition)

[greymalkin]

I recently partitioned my system drive into 2 partitions. The first partition contained my original WinXP install, and on the 2nd partition I loaded win7 64 bit (loving it so far!). Now I want to completely wipe the WinXP and just use win7, BUT I believe the partition WinXP sits on is the boot partition containing the Win7 boot loader that allows me to pick one or the other.

I'm looking for recommendations on how to do this gracefully? I think in order to stretch out the Win7 Partition I might need to copy an image of it to the first partition, then delete the 2nd and expand the partition...but I'm still unsure how to fix/re-establish the boot manager...perhaps I just boot with the win7 disc and run a utility to re-create it?

[Moontrash]

boot into win7 and go to accessories/system tools/disk cleanup...there should be an option where it shows "other operating systems"..it'll show you what size it is etc...then tick the box along with temp files and whatever else you wanna get rid of and it'll delete the os files, thats it

[greymalkin]

sweeet...one more reason to love win7. So that will leave me with what exactly? Will the first partition be empty except for the MBR?...I even considered shrinking that partition down to just a small backup partition for housing my system drive image....but then the question remains how I expand the win7 partition since it's a small one at the end of the drive...do other utilities let me expand backwards then move the files to the beginning of the partition or do I need to copy an image/redirect the boot.ini file?

[greymalkin]

I ended up just booting off a puppy linux CD we use on our aging laptop with a bad HDD controller :P.

Booted into Puppy, deleted all but the boot files on the boot partition
Used GParted to:
1) Shrink Boot partition to 20gb (will use for virtual macine images/etc.
2) Create NTFS partition out of dead space formed between boot and win7 partition
3) Copy win7 Partition to newly created partition
4) Delete "old" win7 partition at end of drive and expand "new" win7 partition to end of disk

I then booted with the win7 CD and did a repair on the boot file...finally I let windows scan the HDD and remove bad indexes. Now everything is working properly!