Remove Windows 7 from a dual boot?

[sabrage]

About a month ago, I finally made the "upgrade" to Windows 7 64-bit. I made sure that all of my drivers were supported (or so I thought) even going so far as to buy a new wireless card and dual-booted XP and 7 (by first installing 7, then XP.) I have a 320GB and a TB hard drive, and my partitions are set up as follows:
Disk 0:
C: My windows XP install, 30 GB
X: The rest of the hard drive, 268 GB, currently blank
Disk 1:
D: My Windows 7 install, 40 GB. Most of my 7 programs are (I believe) here, while I think a large portion of my drivers defaulted to my C drive.
Z: My primary storage drive, 891 GB. I've also installed all of my W7 games here.


Then the problems started. The most immediate and obvious was that my onboard sound-card, based on AC'97, was causing bizarre blips and pops during audio playback. It was INFURIATING. I tried every possible driver pack, from legacy to the latest, zipped binaries to installer packages, and when I finally did get one to fucking install (via liberal use of safe mode) the problem STILL persisted. So I caved and bought a $25 sound card (Asus Xonar DG.) This seemed to fix the problem for a little bit, but I noticed some popping just last night.

I've never had any trouble running anything off Steam with XP, but I bought Sanctum during the summer sale and it is absolutely impossible to get running on my computer. I've seen similar reports of the same error I was getting (crash on startup) but no solution. Works great on my XP partition, and I'm sure that had I gotten around to playing VTM: Bloodlines would've run into a shitstorm of problems there as well.

I neglected to install drivers for my keyboard, an HP Wireless Elite, and I accidentally hit the Sleep button in the top left (right by the ESC key, really terrible design.) This, by some hellborne design flaw, caused my MONITOR to go into sleep mode, and it was impossible to fix this until I dug out an old CRT, plugged it in, and manually installed the keyboard driver (which was never necessary with XP.) I guess that when I hit the button, it activated some sleep feature in Windows intended for laptops, I'm not really sure.

Couple this with the fact that I never felt much need for DX10 (and can't utilize 11,) the fact that 2 gigabytes of RAM is simply not enough for tabbed browsing in Chrome, and nothing else is particularly appealing or even better about 7, I'm done with it. I'd ask this on a more relevant forum, but I couldn't figure out a search string that would pertain to my particular circumstance.

I'd rather forgo the trouble of another formatting, so how would I go about doing this? I'd like to completely remove 7 while the process of backing up all my important files seems fairly straightforward.

[cowthief skank]

Maybe this link might work? http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-uninstall-and-remove-windows-7-or-vista-leaving-windows-xp-on-dual-boot-system/

[SMiD]

Egh..... ok. With your sound issues; could they possibly be speaker-related at this point? A brand new sound card sort of rules out the possibility of incompatible drivers.

For removal of 7 altogether, you'll need to check to see which is your boot drive. I say this because the recommended and most often occurring dual-boot scenario installs XP first and then 7. If it's the drive holding XP, I believe you'll be able to simply mod boot.ini and remove the entry for 7. Then once in XP, copy over what you want to save, and feel free to wipe the partition that previously held 7. At least, it should be that easy; might have to take ownership of a few things (due to NTFS permissions).

Good luck sir! And shame you didn't enjoy 7.

[vinraith]

A somewhat related question: in a configuration like this (where XP was installed first) is there any simple way to do an XP reinstall without having to reinstall 7? I'm guessing not, but my XP install is a bit of an overburdened mess.

[SMiD]

Actually I believe it is possible. I just don't remember how I've seen it done. Sorry :(

[Quetzal]

I'd rather forgo the trouble of another formatting, so how would I go about doing this? I'd like to completely remove 7 while the process of backing up all my important files seems fairly straightforward.

If you think removal is the only option, pop in the XP disc and press R when you see the blue screen.

Next enter you admin password and enter FIXMBR to overwrite the mbr with the xp version, when you boot into xp you can safely remove the 7 partition without bricking the computer.

[sabrage]

I ended up just doing a clean XP install. Fixed every one of my problems. I'm seriously reconsidering upgrading my computer, though, because doing so would entail a DX11 card and *shudder* a return to Windows 7.