The strongest critique we received about our recent guide on dual booting Windows 7 with XP/Vista was that we should've included information covering the likely event of you wanting to kick the beta OS to the curb, sooner or later.

Well, we couldn't agree more, so as a follow up to that guide we're going to look at the reverse process; deleting your Windows 7 partition and reallocating its hard drive space to another partition.

If you recall, in the dual boot guide we looked at two separate approaches for creating a new partition depending if you are running Windows Vista or Windows XP, and we intend to do the same here.

Read the full article at:
http://www.techspot.com/guides/144-removing-windows7/

Please leave your feedback here. Thanks!

for saving me from having to research this later!!!

Why not simply use msconfig to change the boot menu? I'm pretty sure that is what I do when I delete an OS. Tell me if I just sound stupid right now or what.

Depends on the OS you are using, sometimes the installer will move the boot loader/manager to the secondary partition.

I like EasyBCD and Vista Boot Pro for things like that.

I think vmware is also a good way to try out Windows 7.

Thanks a lot! I followed the directions to a T and wound up with a destroyed C: partition. It may have been the fixboot command...I don't know. In any event, I would think long and hard before following these directions!

Absolutely none of the steps in this guide are measurably dangerous to any standard, Windows partition scheme.

fixmbr is not dangerous unless...

• You've used a drive overlay program to work around maximum GB capacity barriers (Think: Seagate, WD installation utilities)
• You have a boot sector virus or partition damage -- anything goes. ;-)

For the sake of safety though, it might be good to add "please backup your stuff!" to the guide. This will ensure people with damaged or non-standard partitions (drive overlay users) don't lose their data, since that is a possibility.

This guide puts your data in no more peril than adding Windows 7 to your drive in the first place.

That seems kind of complicated. I've deleted my win7 partition a few times to reinstall a new version. After deleting and formatting the win7 partition I just boot into XP go to msconfig, boot tab, highlight the win7 boot line hit delete, go back to the general tab, check normal startup and I'm good to go.