Deleting Primary Active Partition

I have an old hard drive that was partitioned in such a way that Windows XP ended up being on an extended partition while the larger data partition was designated primary active. In addition the HD has a second operating system on a small partition which was added for emergencies.

Currently the hard drive looks like this:

C: Data partition - designated as primary active
D: OS partition - without any designation (neither primary nor active)
E: backup OS - designated as primary but not active

Everytime I boot this hard drive, it runs a scan of the computer, (chkdsk maybe?) presumably trying to find the operating system. It then boots up normally. It has not been set up for dual boot.

I would like to reformat this hard drive in such a way that I can keep an XP operating system on E, have a partition C on which to install Windows 7 and still keep the Data partition but have it as D where it belongs. Then the hard disk would look like this:

C: OS Win 7 parition - designated primary active
D: Data partition - extended or primary partition, but not active
E: XP operating system - designated primary but not active

Is there a way to do this without deleting the data? I'm using a third party partitioning software.

 

Are you currently booting to one of these partitions? Or are these on a secondary disk? It will make things a lot easier (and safer) if a secondary disk.

Frankly, XP is just wasting your disk space and IMO, you should just get rid of it - this is especially true if this computer has access to the Internet for then it becomes a threat not just to you, but the rest of us too. Not good.

Messing with partitions is ALWAYS is risky. Therefore, you should ALWAYS make sure you have a backup of any data you don't want to lose. With that in mind, forget about preserving your data in the data partition - for now.

This might be as simple as relettering the partitions. You would have to temporarily reassign them to off the wall letters (like J: K: and L then reletter them back the way you want them since you cannot have two partitions or drive with the same letter.

 

If it is running chkdsk on every start up, it could be that your hard rive is in trouble.
Before doing anything to the partitions, I would suggest you run the hard disk manufacturers check on the hard drive.
There are many here
http://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortname/hard_disk_drive_(hdd)_tools.html
Depending on your hard drive manufacturer, you can scroll down the page, and see- Seagate, Western Digital, etc:

 

These are both good suggestions and I'll try them both, first check the HD to see if it still has some life in it. I'm pretty sure it's running the chkdsk on bootup, because the operating system is not in its expected place on the primary active partition.

This is not a secondary harddrive, but could be. I don't go on the internet with XP, but have been too lazy to install and learn Linux. Maybe that will also become interesting.