Windows 7 WinXP won't allow a clean install of Win7

mlind

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Joined
Feb 25, 2010
I bought a full copy of Win7 Home Premium and booted up my Dell E6400 laptop (imaged in Win XP) with the Win7 CD in the drive. It came up, I did the right steps, and then came to a screen that said to remove the CD and reboot. The problem is that the CD eject button didn't work (so I used a paper clip) and there was no way to reboot so I did I did a hard shut down. When it came back up, it was still Win XP. So I tried again, but this time did the custom install that kept XP on a partition, and that Win7 install worked fine. I have no need for the XP partition and would like to get rid of that partition. This is especially important because I'm giving the laptop to a friend who is not tech savvy so I don't want the XP partition coming back to haunt her. Any ideas?
 
I would think some at Dell or their news group. If there is a restore partition on the drive, it might be interferring with the install.

What does "Imaged in Win XP" mean?

Win 7 does not ask you to remove the DVD.....so you must have been in another install, possibly a recovery of XP.

Is the computer still in Warranty?

If you are running Win 7, maybe you could attach a snipping tool picture of your disk management window.
 
I bought a full copy of Win7 Home Premium and booted up my Dell E6400 laptop (imaged in Win XP) with the Win7 CD in the drive. It came up, I did the right steps, and then came to a screen that said to remove the CD and reboot. The problem is that the CD eject button didn't work (so I used a paper clip) and there was no way to reboot so I did I did a hard shut down. When it came back up, it was still Win XP. So I tried again, but this time did the custom install that kept XP on a partition, and that Win7 install worked fine. I have no need for the XP partition and would like to get rid of that partition. This is especially important because I'm giving the laptop to a friend who is not tech savvy so I don't want the XP partition coming back to haunt her. Any ideas?

Been there, done that. The win7 boot record is in XP so when you remove that partition, you will get an error at boot. The secret is, after removing the XP partition, to boot with the Win7 Disk and select Repair. From there it will find your Win7 partition and make corrections so that you can just boot into Win7. You may have to do boot twice with the disk.... first time it finds your Win7 and second time it marks it as the boot partition.

After doing that, you can use a 3rd party application to reclaim the disk space formerly used by XP.

If you "google" windows 7 & remove XP you will probably get more detailed instructions.
 
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