The Shattered Sky

If you have installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate in dual boot alongside Windows XP, you may eventually for whatever reason wish to remove Windows 7. Today that is exactly what I had to do. First I will tell you what did not work:

What did not work was what may be considered the “usual” way to get rid of the second OS. I began by deleting my Windows 7 partition. The Windows XP install CD is capable of this, but I used a GParted Live CD. GParted is a free Linux based utility that allows not only adding and removing partitions, but resizing as well. I opted to expand the Windows XP partition to fill the entire hard drive.

With Windows 7 gone, I rebooted the machine off the Windows XP CD. When prompted, selected “R” to enter the Recovery Console and ran the fixmbr command to rewrite the boot sector.

Now here’s what happened…I rebooted and found myself facing the Windows 7 bootloader despite the fact that Windows 7 no longer resided on that system. I ran a search on Google and found that I was not alone in XP failing to restore its bootloader after a Windows 7 – and apparently sometimes Windows Vista – removal. I could still boot into XP by selecting “Earlier version of Windows” from the boot menu, but who wants to do that?

I would strongly recommend a small, free Windows utility called EasyBCD from NeoSmart Technologies. Once installed all you need to do is click on “Manage Bootloader”, select “Uninstall the Vista Bootloader” and click on “WriteMBR”. That’s it! The Windows 7 (or Vista) bootloader will be removed and you will be operating exactly as you were before dual booting.