Show Comments. Hide Comments. My Profile Log out. Join Discussion. Add your Comment. Normally, a drive is the physical hardware, and as your attachment shows, you have one , and it is divided into partitions , each one - confusingly - described as a 'logical drive'.
Click to expand The screen shot you show actually has the XP partition as the current system, primary, active partition, which is why you are seeing a message saying 'cannot format the system partition'. I thought from your first post you were trying to reformat the XP partition, but was doing so from Windows 7 or 8 not from XP itself. You just confirmed that, so why is the XP partition the active one? Perhaps the message is telling you the system boot BCD is actually on the XP partition which I warned you to check for.
BUT in all cases where you run even a remote risk of mangling wanted partitions, make sure you have reliable drive images of each partition before you start. Also be prepared to have to reinstall the boot loader or at least edit it after removing XP.
Alas, just as for the system manager in Win7, gparted is not allowed to set an actual active partition to not active. So how do we do it when the XP partition appears to contain your boot process, so XP partition is always active, whatever OS you are actually booting?
Umm, perhaps you need to move the boot loader processes onto another logical drive first Sorry I cannot be more specific. Anyone else??? As I said way back in post 4 - having reformatted the partition containing XP, which also contained your boot loader for win 7 and 8, you have destroyed your boot loader and must rebuild it.
It must point to both Win 7 and win 8 partitions so that you get a dual boot between those two. This can be done from an install DVD of win 7 or 8. You need to boot from the DVD by changing the boot order in the bios and choose an option to repair the boot loader only. I dont really think that just setting the Win 7 drive to system will help, because you won't have a bcd boot loader there, I suspect. BTW you have changed your bios boot order to put the Win7 drive at the top I hope???
Reactions: misor. Repairing windows 7 worked, but I guess I messed up with windows 8. Installed fresh copy of Windows 8. Problem solved, thanks everyone. Right-click on the unallocated block and select the New Simple Volume command.
On the other hand you can just leave it be for now, and in a upcoming article, I'll show you how to redistribute that unallocated space to drive C. Unfortunately, since the unallocated space is at the beginning of the disk, Windows 7's Disk Management tool is unable to extend drive C into that space.
In order for that to be possible, Disk Management requires that the unallocated space be at the end of the disk. Using this technique, you can essentially undo a dual-boot configuration and complete your migration from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Will you use this procedure? If you have any questions or comments concerning this technique, please take a moment to drop by the TechRepublic Community Forums and let us hear from you. TechRepublic's Windows Vista and Windows 7 Report newsletter, delivered every Friday, offers tips, news, and scuttlebutt on Vista and Windows 7, including a look at new features in the latest version of the Windows OS. Automatically sign up today! Read the third article in this series, Capture unallocated disk space from an XP to Windows 7 dual-boot migration , and learn how to redistribute the unallocated space at the beginning of the hard disk back to drive C, thus making Windows 7 the first and only partition on the hard disk.
Greg Shultz is a freelance Technical Writer. Previously, he has worked as Documentation Specialist in the software industry, a Technical Support Specialist in educational industry, and a Technical Journalist in the computer publishing industry. Label the drives In order to make it easy to identify which partition is which throughout this operation, you need to make sure that each partition or drive is labeled.
Figure A Labeling each drive, which is a simple rename operation, will make it easy to identify which partition is which throughout this operation. Creating a System Image The first thing that you'll want to do is protect all your hard work by creating a System Image from within Windows7's Backup and Restore. Once you have Backup and Restore up, select Create a System Image, select your backup location, and then launch the operation to create an image of both drives.
The procedure is shown in Figure B. Figure B Create a system image that contains both drives in the dual-boot configuration as a safety precaution. Make a data backup Even though the system image is a backup, you'll want a separate backup of all your data -- at least one and maybe two, just in case.
Copying boot files When you create a dual-boot system and install Windows 7 on a second partition, Setup installs all the Windows Boot Manager files on the first partition, which in this case is the Windows XP partition.
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