How to delete OS without reformatting?

[mikehende]

How many ways are there to erase an OS on a drive without reformatting?

[Dan18960]

You can always move the drive into another system and just delete folders you want to delete. That way you can preserve the data.

I don't know of anyway to delete system folders while an operating system is running it's services (at least in Windows 2k Pro and XP - you could do that with the Win 9x versions).

[mikehende]

Sorry Dan, I should have asked how to do this on a laptop? Yes, on a desktop you can simply add the drive as a 2nd drive to an existing system and format just that drive. Reason I'm asking is, the wife was having a lot of problems trying to reinstall an OS, she was getting a message that the exisitng OS cannot be deleted, I was finally able to overwrite the original OS with another but I would like to know what to do next time I should run into this situation.

[fleamailman]

Seems you solved it before I added this post which now can be ignored.


Isn't the result the same, Partition magic or other third party program, boot up of linux, and then the other question is fat32 or ntfs, anyway what is the idea behind the question?

[mikehende]

anyway what is the idea behind the question?


the wife was having a lot of problems trying to reinstall an OS, she was getting a message that the exisitng OS cannot be deleted, I was finally able to overwrite the original OS with another but I would like to know what to do next time I should run into this situation.