How to manually Remove Windows NT or Windows 2000

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows NT Server 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0

Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0

Microsoft Windows NT Advanced Server

Microsoft Windows Professional

Microsoft Windows Server

Microsoft Windows Advanced Server

Profile

This article describes how to remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 from your computer.

More information

Before you begin deleting, be sure you know where Windows NT or Windows 2000 is installed, what scope you want to remove, and how hard to partition and format the disk. Then use the information in one of the following sections of this article:

Remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 from the boot sequence

Delete Primary NTFS partition

Remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 files

Note: If your hard disk contains partitions that use the NTFS file system, remove the partition in Windows NT or Windows 2000 before you remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 from the boot sequence.

Remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 from the boot sequence

There are two ways to remove a Windows NT or Windows 2000 boot sector from your computer:

If you want to go back to the original MS-DOS configuration, you can start MS-DOS, and then type SYS c:. This command replaces the Windows NT or Windows 2000 boot sector with the MS-DOS boot sector and allows your computer to boot MS-DOS. The following files will be left under the root folder and can be removed after the SYS c: operation is performed:

Pagefile.sys

Boot.ini

Ntldr

Ntdetect.com

Ntbootdd.sys

Note: The Ntbootdd.sys file is installed only if the SCSI host adapter is installed on Windows NT or Windows 2000.

If you want to go back to your original Windows 95 or Windows 98 configuration, you can also start your computer with a Microsoft Windows 95 or Microsoft Windows 98 boot Floppy, and then use the sys c: command.

If you want to leave Ntldr on disk, you can start MS-dos without prompting by changing the way the operating system and timeout values are started. To do this, start the System tool in Control Panel, click the Start/Close tab, click MS-DOS in the Startup box, and then type 0 in the Display list n seconds box.

Note: If the primary partition is converted to NTFS, there is only one way to go back to automatically start MS-DOS, which is to reformat the drive and reinstall MS-DOS. If this is the case, see the next section.

Delete Primary NTFS partition

In general, modifications to a bootable NTFS primary partition may not succeed for the following reasons:

An NTFS partition is not recognized by MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.0. The MS-DOS Fdisk program reports NTFS partitions as OS/2 high-performance file System (HPFS) partitions.

You cannot modify or delete an NTFS primary partition within such a partition.

To delete or modify an NTFS primary partition, use one of the following methods:

Start MS-DOS version 6.0 with a floppy disk, and then press Return to continue installing MS-DOS 6. When prompted, select Remove Files.

Initializes the Windows NT installation from a floppy disk or CD-ROM. When prompted, press P to delete the partition.

Remove the NTFS partition with the Delpart tool (Delpart.exe). The Delpart tool is provided only by Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 Resource Kit. Windows NT 3.5, 3.51, or 4.0 Resource kits do not include this tool. Windows NT 3.1 Resource Kit can be downloaded from the following Web site:

Ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/reskit/nt31/i386/reskit.exe

Boot the OS/2 1.x from the floppy disk and run its Fdisk program. To delete a partition, specify the/d option.

Remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 files

You can free up disk space by deleting the following folders to remove Windows NT or Windows 2000 files.

Windows NT 3.51 and earlier

Users

Win32app

Winnt

Note: The Winnt folder name may have other forms of change. Windows NT or Windows 2000 can be installed in the same folder as Windows 3.1. If this is the case, only the System32 folder under the Windows folder should be deleted.

Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000

Users

Winnt

Note: The Winnt folder name may have other forms of change. The following folders are used by Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows 95. Therefore, you can delete Windows 95 only if it is not running and you do not want to keep it installed:

Program Files

Recycled