[Kei_Centillion]

I recently installed windows vista for the first time on my system, which usally runs variants of xp (home, professional). After growing accustomed to vista, I formated my xp hard drive (a 10 gig hard drive, with my xp OS on it for this BIOS).

Bad move, I found out. Vistas would not even be detected as a bootable OS, so I had to rushedly reinstall a copy of XP. Now, I'm back to using XP with Vista inspirat, but I'm Highly... HIGHLY HIGHLY agitated that the Program Files/Users/Windows folders ramain on my favorite "storage" hard drive, where I installed vista to, and they REFUSE to be deleted; I tried using file shredders in safe mode and standard XP OS, but they remain.

Is there any way to free up those 8-10 gigs that "Vista" is taking up? Or is it embeded into my hard drive now, and I've got to bite the loss until I can obtain a new hard drive to copy all my stuff to and reformat?

Thanks, I've apreciated the halp I've received so far and hope to get this new issue resolved as well!

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I got an idea, I'm going to try it, if I can get some help, I'm not sure how to do this...

I will try to get a floppy drive if possible, but I'm wondering if it is possible to make a boot CD that goes to msdos, bypassing windows? If someone has an ISO file of a bootable msdos cd or knows where I can get one, I'd be much obliged.

What I'm going to try to do is delete the folders using either "deltree" or "*.*", does this sound like it will work?

[Kei_Centillion]

I got an idea, I'm going to try it, if I can get some help, I'm not sure how to do this...

I will try to get a floppy drive if possible, but I'm wondering if it is possible to make a boot CD that goes to msdos, bypassing windows? If someone has an ISO file of a bootable msdos cd or knows where I can get one, I'd be much obliged.

What I'm going to try to do is delete the folders using either "deltree" or "*.*", does this sound like it will work?

[StewBizzle]

Don't know about using MSDOS to mess with it, I'm not sure that will get you too far, what might work is downloading a bootable Linux Live cd, and accessing the drive, then attempting to delete the files that are taking up so much space. Make sure it's something like Knoppix though, so it can mount NTFS partitions from the get-go, and it's viewable from the desktop.

If all else fails, you could backup everything you want to keep from the "storage drive," on another disk, then format it using a multitude of possible utilities, and simply restore the files you backed up once you are done, but that would definitely be the loooong way around.