Removal of Second Operating System

I know this has been addressed before but unfortunately I cant find an answer to my own particular problem as yet.

OK So one day last week my system started melting down due to a corrupted hard drive and eventually I had to do a re-installation of Vistax64 on another drive which i re-formatted for the occasion. That was fine except that the boot up still referred to the original boot sequence on the old drive. Through using msconfig i deleted the incorrect boot reference and all seemed fine once more.

HOWEVER when it came to trying to delete the original OS in Disk Management i received this error message:

Presumably this is because Windows still refers to this drive as a system drive. I thought i'd addressed that previously by disconnecting the power to the corrupted drive and attempting a repair to the new C drive via the installation disk. This appears to be a bad assumption.

Any ideas as to how I might rectify this so that i can re-format the old drive and make some use of it?

Many thanks
Mark

Welcome to the Forums.

Instead of messing around I would get Partition Wizard

The bootable CD can delete it I'm sure. Also it's good to have for stuff Disk Management can't do.

It is free software and highly recommended on these forums. There are usage guides on the site.

Hey there. Thanks for the welcome.
I followed your advice & downloaded/ installed that partition tool. However now I've used it I seem to be in worse shape than before.

Its formatted the old drive & attempted reloading but the screen hung during the boot & gave me an "error loading OS" message. Consequent attempts at trying to repair the installation aren't working. While trying to use the System Recovery Options from the install disk it doesn't even list the OS as being present. When I try to find the disk drivers I have no idea where to look. Startup repair doesn't work either.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Getting a bit fraught here.

Cheers
Mark

OK... Re-installed Vistax64 on the old corrupted-but-now-reformatted disk just so i could have a look around after my Partition Wizard adventures. For the sake of clarity let me call that installation the OD version (Old Drive Installation) This meant i had two installations of the same OS on my computer again; the OD Version and the ND version (New Drive installation which i installed after the original C Drive started melting down.

However, rather than detecting the two OS's and giving me a multi boot option the system only saw the OD version. Then - after a coupla hours in the desert, trying to figure out what to do, and without me doing anything at all, Windows (after ignoring the ND version after several reboots via the install disk) suddenly decides the ND version is there, repairs it and makes it available.

Is this weird?

The end result is that I'm more or less back where I was before with two OS's and a hard drive i'm not sure if i can reformat. I'm feeling a tad cautious about all this now. And understandably so i'd think.

Attached is the new screen capture of Disk Management. Does it look like Drive D (with the OD version on it) can be safely reformatted now?

Sorry for the peskiness
Cheers
Mark

Sorry - forgot the capture

The idea of Partition Wizard Bootable CD is not to install it but to downlload the iso file and burn it to CD or DVD. You boot the CD/DVD then you are not running from the disk you are trying to format.

You can use Imgburn freeware or many other tools to burn an iso to a blank CD or DVD.

Edit: That's why the link I gave was directly to the Bootable CD version of Partition Wizard. I get flustered too when my disk partitions act up. It's easy to be distracted when that is happening.

Looks to me like the d-drive is not is use. You should be able to reformat it. The problem before was that the bootloader was installed on the drive with the old OS since that was installed first. Hence the error you received after the reformat. Restoring the bootloader on the other install would have been tricky but doable if you have the correct expertise. You should have been able to restore the bootloader without reinstalling Windows though. You will still have 2 entries in your current bootloader though. To bypass it from the start menu type in msconfig, click on the boot tab, select the install you want to use, click on set as default, and set the timeout to 0. After that hit ok. If you feel up to it I know of a program that will remove the entry from the boot loader but it is an advanced program and if you do something wrong with it you will delete the boot loader or your OS's entry in the bootloader and end up with the same OS not found error.