A friend of mine had another friend update his Win 2000 system to Win XP. The person SAID he would leave Win 2000 on in case my friend didn't like XP. Now my friend would like to get rid of the 2000 OS to free up space. He has forgotten his 2000 password, and can't log in to it. Both the Win 2000 and Win XP OS's are on C drive. Can I just delete his Win 2000 OS? What is the best way to get rid of it?

I'm afraid that I don't know anything more about my friend's system, so I hope there are enough details to go on.

Thanks.

BruceWhat you could do is just find the xp cd and format the harddrive, which will delete all data.Or if you can delete windows 2000 in windows EXPLORER then that might work as well but i would go with the formating.if the two OS's are on separate partitions, simply format the partition containing windows 2000.

Otherwise, you can delete the windows 2000 system folder.

The only change afterward would be to modify BOOT.INI so that the OS choices menu no longer comes up (on account of W2K no longer being bootable).This is actually a pretty messy cleanup if you think about it...
Win2K was on C: we'll presume.
If XP was INSTALLED to another partition let's again assume and say it's on D:
XP wrote files to the bootsector of C:

If you format or delete the Win2k folder.... C: will no longer boot....
Therefore no XP either.

More details would be good before anyone hoses your friends systemBoth Win 2000 and Xp are on C, there are no other partitions.

BruceWhen you turn the computer on, do you have the option of starting up either operating system?

Do us favor: click start and then choose My Computer. What is listed there?Yes, when the system starts, you can choose either OS. He cannot start Win 2000 though as he has forgotten the password. I do not have access to his computer right now, so I cannot look under "My Computer".

However, when I looked at it last, both Win 2000 and Win XP were both on C drive. Also, the only other drive letter was the CD drive.

BruceHas he considered a clean install of XP ? ?My friend suffers from a fairly severe mental illness, and does not take to change well. I am trying to find a way to do things as unobtrusively as POSSIBLE so as not to cause him undue stress.

BruceGot it...
I would suggest an image program then first...i use Acronis True Image but there are others.
Macrium makes a FREE one called Reflect but i've yet to test it.
Create an image of the drive as it is and burn it to CD/DVD...this is just in case the experiment goes South.
Then delete/remove the Win2K install...this may be tricky because i believe both Win2K and XP name it WiNNT so be sure you are getting rid of the correct one.
You will also have to edit the boot.ini as BC mentioned above to no longer show the Win2K option at boot time.
Create a backup of this file and save it beforehand.
Good Luck and let us know if there's any other questions...Thanks for the help.

Bruce