deleting partition

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bit4bit

New Member
Hi, I currently have winxp pro, ubuntu, and vista business 64 bit triple booted on my PC. A view of my partitions in the vista disk management is attached.

I have transferred all my important files from the xp partition to the vista partition, and would now like to delete, reformat, and reinstall xp on the xp partition, since my xp installation is corrupted.

However, as shown in the picture, it lists the xp partition as being the system partition, and when trying to reformat or delete the partition, I get an error message, saying I'm unable to do it.

I think this has something to do with the boot information being stored on the xp partition but I'm not sure.

Could someone give me a little step by step of how to go about this?


The second thing I wanted to do was to have a single bootloader for all three operating systems, and memtest86+. Currently I'm faced first with the GRUB loader, from which I select windows vista longhorn loader, and within that I can select vista, or 'earlier version of windows (winxp). Is it possible to combine all bootpaths into a single bootloader? If so how?

Thanks alot
 

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I'd say either boot to Ubuntu and install gparted or boot to the Ubuntu LiveCD and use it from there. That way there shouldn't be any restriction with it being a system partition or anything.
 
The problem you will face is that reinstalling Windows will overwrite the MBR. Ubuntu will not boot again until you either fix Grub (takes practice) or reinstall Ubuntu.

If you still plan to have a triple boot at the end of this, boot into Ubuntu as The Other One suggests, use gparted to format your xp partition. Reinstall XP then reinstall Ubuntu. Reinstalling Ubuntu is such a quick job that it outweighs frigging around with Grub. This will definitely work without any data loss.
 
Carlton said:
The problem you will face is that reinstalling Windows will overwrite the MBR. Ubuntu will not boot again until you either fix Grub (takes practice) or reinstall Ubuntu.

If you still plan to have a triple boot at the end of this, boot into Ubuntu as The Other One suggests, use gparted to format your xp partition. Reinstall XP then reinstall Ubuntu. Reinstalling Ubuntu is such a quick job that it outweighs frigging around with Grub. This will definitely work without any data loss.
Click to expand...


Thanks both, I've just decided I'm going to delete ubuntu now anyway, since I have it on my laptop anyway, and dual boot XP and vista. In this case how would I go about it? Thanks
 
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