Remove Dual Boot from 2 Drives???

Moderators, please relocate if my post is in the wrong forum.

My problem--I have two physical HD's on my system. Through a number of unwanted reinstalls of XP Home I now have the following situation
--Drive 1 has XP Home installed on the partition
--Drive 2 has XP Home installed on the partition. A second partition contains an Acronis secure zone.
--I exclusively use XP Home on Drive 1

My question--How do I remove XP Home from Drive 2 safely. Knowledge database searching I've done seems to assume two operating systems on the same physical drive. I'm not interested in rendering Drive 2 inoperable as it contains backups.

Any pointers are appreciated.

 

Gus:

Two questions first:

1. If you remove drive 2 from the PC does XP Home on drive 1 boot correctly?
2. If you remove drive 1 from the PC does XP Home on drive 2 boot correctly?

The reason for asking is to figure out if the two installations are independent of each other. If they are, it makes life easier.

 

I disconnected Drive 2 and successfully booted from Drive 1 straight to the desktop. No problems encountered in running various apps.

Next I disconnected Drive 1 and booted from Drive 2 to an OS selection screen. I then selected the OC pointing to Drive one and was promptly told windows could not read the drive . . . .

I rebooted the system (Drive 1 disconnected) and selected the OS pointing to Drive 2. The system booted to the validation popup. I then shut the system down and reconnected Drive 1.

Conclusions

 

Gus:

Then it sounds like your OS on drive 1 is completely independent of the OS on drive 2. It would be safe to delete the OS on drive 2 then.

Where are your backups stored on drive 2? Are they in their own partition or are they in the same partition used by XP on drive 2?

If the backups are on their own partition then there are several ways to proceed, depending on what you want to do with the space on the second drive. You could use Windows Disk Management to reformat the partition used by XP on drive 2. Or, you could use Acronis Disk Director to delete the XP partition and then to repartition the drive as you see fit.

If the backups are in the XP partition on drive 2 then you should move them somewhere else before deleting the XP partition. Create a separate partition for temporary storage, if necessary, or copy them to an external drive or to drive #1. After deleting XP you can then move them back to drive 2.

 

I was hoping you said. My other Acronis software is True Image 10 (IIRC). My plan is to use disk 2 as a data disk. Disk 2 contains in a separate partition and secure zone used by True Image.

So it seems to me I can format the partition containing XP or Drive 2. That would get rid of the XP installation and I can then convert the partition to data storage. In any case my backups would remain unchanged.

Sound about right?

 

Gus:

That sounds right.

 

Update

Worked out just fine. Used Disk Director and it performed as advertised.

Thanks for the pointers.

 

One needs to search the registry on C to see if it refers to anything on drive, I ASSuME, D.

The best way to do this is with a registry editor such as Registry Workshop.

And then you have to edit C:\boot.ini to remove the reference to the removed OS.