Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

[Bladeeagle]

Long story short, I was with Windows XP first and decided to dual boot with Windows 7 (mainly because of Battlefield 3) however I forgot to partition my hard drive and so Windows 7 just installed with all my files as hostage. Now I wish to remove Windows 7 but I can't without losing all the files that is on the same hard-drive as Windows 7. Is there anyway to remove Windows 7 without losing those files?

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971762

See if that helps you.

[Bladeeagle]

Re: Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

Right it says to remove Windows 7 by formatting the partition containing Windows 7, or delete it entirely. This allows the earlier operating system to reclaim the disk space. But I forgot to create a separate partition for Windows 7 and so it installed onto my existing hard drive with all my files from Windows XP.

[signa]

Re: Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

Imo, i would download a linux "live" cd, boot into it and copy whatever files are important to you to another drive before trying any "windows" based "fix".

I would go with Puppy linux (try lucid puppy), or Xubuntu, or Linux Mint LXDE. those 3 have more standard type desktops. with any of those you should be able to download the .iso file, burn it to cd as an image (win7 can do this), then reboot, booting from cd.
with puppy, you'll see all your drive as icons on the desktop (listed as sdb1, etc), with other linux you will have to run the file manager utility and go from there.

[Bladeeagle]

Re: Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

Is there a way to perhaps move my OS from one drive to another?

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Windows XP and Windows 7 Dual Boot

There are imaging programs that can do that, such as clonezilla. I think you could use a trial version of Acronis. Some hard drive manufactureres have cloning utilites as well.

I wasnt going to ask this because you wanted a direct answer, but how are your files being held hostage? If you dont care to say, thats OK, I understand. No big deal.