Removing vista files

I have a laptop with 2 partitions on it. the first contained vista which came with the laptop and the second windows 7. i would like to completely remove vista and essentially format that partition. i have already removed vista as a bootable os from msconfig but it wont let me format the partition. I assume there are some files and drivers win7 needs to boot there.

so in summary i need to clear the vista partition without effecting win7 any help would be greatly appreciated.

It's probably not anything to do with there having data contained in it. It's more likely to be a setting with that partition. I'd look there.

the vista partition is piratically full. I only removed it from the bootable drives list. would the win7 partition have the required drivers on its own partition.

You might try gparted, a free partition manager. You can download and burn a bootable cd of gparted.

Are you using disk management program in windows 7? You should be able to delete then re-create then reformat the partition that vista currently occupies. You will lose all data on the vista partiton if that's an issue do backups first.

I have a usb boot of ubuntu if thats relavant. i am not currently using a disk manager. i have backed up any files that i may need already so im not worried about losing anything.

Windows has one built in, so you are using a disk manager whether you know it or not (same goes for a boot loader.) And yes, if your Windows 7 partition boots then it will have self-contained all the correct drivers it needs to run. That's not an issue.

in the disk manager the vista partition has in brackets(system,active,primary partition)
where as the win7 has (boot,page file,crash dump, primary partition). what is the purpose of system on c(vista) and should this be on d(win7)

drive letter means little (it's more of a notation for human interaction) What you need to do is make the C: drive an extended partition, not a primary. Then it should let you format and combine.

how would i go about changing that.

Click Here. Just for the record, I typed into google "change partition to extended" and clicked on the first thing that came up...

Right-click on the applicable folder(s), click properties, then click the security tab & make sure simple file sharing is NOT enabled and configure (add or edit) the permissions so that everyone has full access.