Remove 2000Pro - Dual Boot

[herrslime]

A user decided to upgrade his laptop from 2000Pro to XP Home all by himself. Instead of applying it as an upgrade he installed it as a dual boot. That was about a year ago.

Now he informs me he has done this and wants the 2000Pro boot removed so he has more room. He doesn't want anything done to his XP since it is "just the way he wants it". I would ignore it but he is the boss. Aarrgh.

Is there any easy way to do this? Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks

 

[billy71]

I have done it in the boot.ini file, changed the boot sequence of the one I wanted to boot first to (0) and the other to (1).
Changed the wait to 0. It has been a while but you might check it out, be careful. It won't even show the boot screen if I remember correctly.
Billy

 

[herrslime]

I want to remove the OS not just the item during bootup. I am looking for an uninstall process that will not affect XP.

Thanks

 

[scottew]

I am not sure if this will work, but you can try it out.

Boot up the PC with WinXP. Go into the Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management, then Disk Management.

Then try reformatting the partition that has Win2k.

 

[wolluf]

Sounds like the user is not an expert - so did he install XP to a second partition or just in the same partition as 2k? (sounds likely to be same partition). If that's so, then you just need to remove the 2k windows folder (which is normally \winnt - leaving just XP's \windows) as well as the boot.ini edit.

If it was into a second partition, to reclaim the space, you can just delete everything in the 2k partition except boot.ini, ntldr & ntdetect.com in the root of C:. This will leave an essentially empty partition. If you want to merge the 2 into one, I'd suggest backup and a clean install, and any method to move XP from second to merged single partition is fraught with disastrous possibilities.

 

[herrslime]

XP was installed in the same partition as the original 2k.

One concern I have about simply deleting the 2k folder is that programs were installed on the computer while 2k was the only operating system. Lots of programs dump dll's etc into the windows folder and sub folders. Deleting the folder would delete these and render these programs unusable requiring a reinstall. Something I am trying to avoid.

I was hoping there was a way to do an uninstall which would remove the windows programs but leave behind the stuff that was not part of the OS.

 

[herrslime]

FYI

I ended up reformatting the entire drive and starting over. Seems that was the only way to eliminate verything from the dual install.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions.

 

[wolluf]

sorry I didn't reply to your post of 27th.

It wouldn't matter about dlls etc in the 2k windows & system folders, because XP doesn't use them. Any programs installed under 2k which use such files needto be reinstalled under XP anyway (even if to same \Program files location).

Anyway, you're up and clean now.

btw - 2 operating systems should not be installed into the same partition.