I'm confused on what to do here, and I'm really afraid to try anything without asking first because I know that I can easily mess up my system.

I have Vista installed on one hard drive, and I just bought a new hard drive and installed Windows 7 on it. I copied all of my files over to the new hard drive (the one with W7 on it) and now I want to reformat my old hard drive (the one with Vista on it) to clean it up so that I can use it for storage.

Here's a picture of the Disk Management Window:
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/5517/21907114.png

To sum this up, my question is how to reformat the hard drive with Vista on it, without screwing up my computer.

Thanks for helping!

Copying is not enough , better use some backup software , if possible upload it somewhere.

What do you mean? I have Windows 7 installed and working fine, and all of my files are copied over.

What I need to do, is reformat the Drive 0 you see in the picture, without messing up the system boot or anything else.

Can anyone help me?!

hi ,i never backup ,been copying personal file the way you did for years, so your win7 is installed on the 500 gig drive correct ,if yes ,then all you need to do now is right click on 300 gig drive showing vista and chose format ,set as active if and when prompted

I can't! Take a look at this picture, in which I'm right-clicking the Vista drive: http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/6625/79006895.png

Did you get an installation disc with your new drive?
If you did, it has the tools on it to reformat the drive, if not, go to the manufacturers web site of the new HDD and download their Utility Software, ie; Maxtor/Maxblast, Seagate/SeaTools, etc.
Use their software to delete and reformat the "D" drive to set it up they way you want.
Just make sure you delete the Vista drive.

Same here

it just so happings im doing allmost the same thing you are doing with your computer ,i have installed a drive and put win7 on it ,and have a drive with winxp on it [2 partirtions ] only difference is our drive 0 and drive 1 are switched around ,i getthe format option on my winxp drive but not the win7 one assuming because its 1st drive and active
did you try going to mycomputer and right clciking on the vista drive and choose vista ,also the manufactors disk like mentions above ,i know it doesn't come with a lot of drives when you buy them but can be downloaded from the hdd makers website ,utility disk

I just tried formatting it from Computer, but it says that Windows cannot format it.

Something else I forgot to mention.. I have my Vista install disk, so I can probably reformat the hard drive by booting into that. But I'm worried that reformatting the drive will mess up the computer somehow. You'll notice from the first picture I posted, that the Vista drive is the "system" drive. Will reformatting it mess up the way the computer boots? I JUST got Windows 7 installed, and I do not want to mess it up!!

as far as i know, it shouldn't ,cant say for sure though as it is a computer and anything can happen ,if it were me i would do it ,what the fugg