Delete Vista without formatting drive

[elrasho]

I have been sual booting XP and Vista and have decided to get rid of Vista. Thing is I have many files and games on the same drive I installed Vista so I dont want to foramt that partition.

When I try to deleted the Windows folder I get:

'Access denied.. make sure disk is not write protected and not currently in use...' error messages

Please help, its using 8GB worth of space!!

 

[Raptor_Jesus]

mhm...try booting in XP with safe mode.

 

[elrasho]

tried that still gives me the same error message

 

[Eejit]

Try a boot disk.

 

[Krynn72]

You're probably not going to be able to use those games or any programs you installed under vista once you get rid of the OS. Because of the registry or something.

I know that when I installed windows xp on a new hard drive in my computer, and then uninstalled the old windows xp on my older hard drive, I couldnt use any of the programs or games I had installed before.

 

[-Psy-]

Steam games don't use the registry. I formatted my Windows drive a few months ago and aferwards I loaded up Steam and all my games worked fine.

 

[elrasho]

I have installed all my games under XP BUT on the same partition Vista is on

 

[Krynn72]

I have installed all my games under XP BUT on the same partition Vista is on

Oh, ok nevermind then.

I found this guide which might help.

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winvista/uninstall/

 

[elrasho]

looks like Vista is sitting on ther for life.. wasts of 8GB that sh1t GRRRR

 

[-Psy-]

How about you just re-install all your games? :|

 

[Laivasse]

Delete it by booting to a DOS prompt and deleting from there?

 

[elrasho]

Delete it by booting to a DOS prompt and deleting from there?

Ive been meaing to try that but how do I boot to DOS Prompt?

 

[Laivasse]

I'm not sure if it's conventionally possible with Windows XP - I used to use my spare Windows 98 CD as a boot disk and it gave me the option to boot to DOS when booting up then. Try googling it to see if there's another way.

 

[Fliko]

Go get a Linux Distrubution that can boot off of a CD, boot it off the CD and then delete the folder.
And is having 2 OSes on 1 partition even efficient?

 

[Eejit]

Ultimate Boot Disk For Windows is pretty awesome.