Hi guys, I bought Windows 7 and a new hard drive.

I Installed Windows 7 on the new hard drive and would like to keep most of the data on my original hard drive (as a backup) and would rather not transfer all data over to my new hard drive just to transfer it back (375GB worth)

Would deleting the WINDOWS folder on the old hard drive prevent this. I have searched the internet and all I see is people who have installed over their existing OS and editing the boot.ini but i know thats a important system file.

Boot.ini is a legacy file that only applies to systems that are running XP or older versions of windows and it isn't used on systems that have Vista or 7 installed. Hit the windows key and r to bring up the run command. Type msconfig, hit enter, and confirm that you want to run the program.

Click on the boot tab, make sure windows 7 is set as the default (you should be able to read which is the default), and change the timeout to 0 seconds. Hit ok. If 7 isn't the default click on set as default.

Hi thanks for the reply.

I did what you said except i could only set the timeout to 3 seconds (any lower and a dialog box came up saying it must be between 3 and 999 seconds)

It also only shows Windows 7 as an installed OS. Could this be down to my XP being on a separate hard drive?

Windows 7 is the only entry? There isn't anything else? XP might have been renamed to something else such as earlier version of Windows.

No there is no other option.

The OS is on different hard drives

would deleting the windows folder (or even re-naming it if i needed it back) work? I don't want to lose all the data on it.

I don't understand your dilemma. If there is no entry in the boot loader for XP then it shouldn't currently be possible for you to use XP unless perhaps if you tell your computer to boot into that drive. Therefore I don't understand what your concern is. As for deleting the folder, you can try but I doubt that Windows will let you delete all of it or even most of it. If it is trying to boot into XP then deleting the windows folder won't stop that.