Now have 2 copies of Windows 7 installed

[Mervyn Thomas]

Originally I upgraded from Vista to W7 which was fine and I ended up with a
dual boot system on 2 partitions which I didn't want but could cope with.
Later I had some W7 problem and managed to install a new copy of W7 on top
of the vista partition.
So I now have a choice at start up . The first instance of W7 will not
activate and leaves an "Illegal copy of W7" on the screen but otherwise
works OK. The second boot option gives a good clean w7 installation.
How do I know which partition the good W7 is in (C: or D and can I either
format that partiion to get rid of the faulty installation or can I just
delete files to clear some space?

 

[Steel]

Originally I upgraded from Vista to W7 which was fine and I ended up with a
dual boot system on 2 partitions which I didn't want but could cope with.
Later I had some W7 problem and managed to install a new copy of W7 on top
of the vista partition.
So I now have a choice at start up . The first instance of W7 will not
activate and leaves an "Illegal copy of W7" on the screen but otherwise
works OK. The second boot option gives a good clean w7 installation.
How do I know which partition the good W7 is in (C: or D and can I either
format that partiion to get rid of the faulty installation or can I just
delete files to clear some space?

The O/S uses 15-20 GB of disk space. I know I would want to get that
space back.

You should be be able to delete the partition off the drive you don't
want the O/S on and reformat.

There use to be a way to go to the boot.ini file and remove the second
entry of the boot path for a dual boot sistuation.

You can look at the information being talked about for the replacement
for the boot.ini on Windows 7 to see the dual boot paths and get rid of
the path you don't want so that it doesn't show.

<http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21741595-Windows-7-boot-manager-editing-questions>


I think what's in the link is part of what you have to do.

 

[Mervyn Thomas]

Thanks - got there eventually!........................M