I have vista and xp installed on the hard drive of my laptop. In order to do this I partitioned my hard disk. I now want to uninstall xp and just leave vista on my machine. Can anyone please tell me how to do this?

Many thanks in advanced from Hippocrat.

It's tempting to tell you to boot into Vista and then simply format the XP partition. However, if your PC looks to the XP partition for the boot information (e.g. the Boot.INI file which gives you the menu to boot between the two available operating systems), then you mustn't wipe all that out or you'll end up with neither OS being able to boot up.

Was XP originally installed on C:\ and then Vista later installed onto another partition?

Dear DJ

Thankx for your prompt reply - you are correct in that xp was the original os on the c drive and then Vista was installed on a partition.

Would be obliged for your further comments.

Thanx again

Hippocrat

There may be other opinions but I don't think that you can truly wipe the XP partition at all. At best, you could probably get away with editing the Boot.ini file so that the only entry it has in it is the option to automatically boot to Vista ..... and then wipe the 'Documents and Settings', 'Program Files' and 'Windows' directories from the XP partition. The danger of this is that some applications or drivers that you might have installed onto Vista might not have actually looked for where Vista was installed and just assumed that it was the C:\ drive. In which case, they could have installed to "C:\Program Files", etc. rather than the Vista partition. Deleting those directories from the C:\ drive would damage your installs in the Vista partition as well.

Your safest bet is to leave well alone. You can set the Boot.ini file to automatically boot to Vista without even asking you (we can talk you through doing that). If you can afford to lose the disk space to the XP install that you aren't going to use any more.

If you want to chance it, follow my suggestions in the first paragraph. But I'd recommend taking an image of the whole hard disk using something like Norton Ghost and getting that backup onto DVDs or a USB drive just in case.

Dear DJ

Many thanx once again - I will take your advice and let this particular sleeping dog lie!

Much obliged

Hippocrat