Can't get rid of old windows

[KirkR]

I upgraded to windows 7 ulti 64-bit from windows 7 home premium 32-bit. I installed 7 ulti on a different disk than the one with home premium, and am now trying to delete everything on my old drive. but I can't. I really don't know what I did wrong, and I tried 3 different ways to clear the drive. it just won't let me, and now I can't even see the drive in "My computer". I'm usually alright with figuring this stuff out, but I'm just clueless.

 

[Wamphryi]

Click Start. Right click on Computer. Click Manage. Click on Disk Management. The OS will probably ask you to initialize the drive in question. Say yes. If that doesn't happen then go down the list of drives. Right click on the drive in question. Delete off all partitions on the drive including the 100 MB System Partition and the Primary Partition. (Make sure this is not the drive you have installed 64 bit Win 7 on). Make a new partition and quick format the drive. You should now see the drive in Computer and it should be cleaned of the previous OS.

If you cant see the drive then it is not being seen at a BIOS level. I suspect the drive will be there however.

If your BIOS wont play with two system drives then leave the drive you want to clean attached and disconnect the one you want to keep. Boot off a Win 7 install disk and delete all the partitions off in the initial part of the installation. Once this is done the drive will be blank. Exit set up reconnect the drive and follow the instructions as above.

 

[KirkR]

I've tried going to disk management, and deleting the main partition. There is no 100MB system partition (that I can see). When I try to delete the whole partition it says "Windows cannot delete the active system partition on this disk.".

I will try the second method.

 

[swifty_morgan]

disconnect the old drive. boot up with the new drive. when at desktop connect the old drive. let windows find it. format. ..... no drive yet ?...reboot.... go into bios and get it to seek second drive.

 

[KirkR]

Best answer selected by Kirkr.

 

[KirkR]

Thanks Wamphryi, worked great! Though I accidentally formatted the wrong drive and had to install windows again, it did exactly what I wanted.

Gracias.

 

[shanky887614]

side note for visitors

there are many tools like easus partition manager which will do it even to your active partition

its free, just install it then when you try to edit your active partition in it, it ask you to restart then it does its thing in its own bootable enviroment and then you can load windows as normal,

i did this when i resized it when i moved all my games off c partition to h partition (using steam mover to link them to the c drive partition locations- this halved my backup size of c partition- i didnt move where it saves the game saves so there backed up every few days and the main game data only gets backed up after/if i install/update a game)