Dual boot and root files that can be deleted!?

[Kit Carson McGuire]

First, EasyBCD sure saved my butt more than once during this project! So many thanks! Now then, I have a dual boot system I'm working on/building. The first drive (C is XP Pro 32bit on it's own Seagate 500GB drive. Next, I installed Win7 on the next (2nd) Seagate 500GB drive. So far, so good even though MS assigns drive letters in reverse order. When in XP I'm seeing everything the way it should be. When I'm in Win7 drive "C:" shows as drive D:. They are flip-flopped. An annoyance nonetheless. I like to SEE everything in, on, withing my systems. Nothing hidden! I see Win7's install put some really weird new files on the root of my C: drive. See attached screenshot. I'd like to know exactly which files are SAFE to delete. Obviously the 4 XP root files are needed: boot.ini, NTDETECT.COM, ntldr and my pagefile.sys. Win7 along with EasyBCD put extra files in the root of C: drive. I can understand the files: bootmgr and wedaolu (whatever they are). So is it safe to delete the *.BAK files? MCBXK? ACPUW? and the *.saved file from EasyBCD? Need to know what I can delete please and thank you!

ALSO I see that EasyBCD created a folder on my C: (Windows XP) drive labeled NST, which contains a copy of my ntldr file!? Is there any way of fixing this so when I boot ntldr is seen in the ROOT of my C: drive???

 

[Terry60]

Drive letters are not "real".
There is no drive letter on any of your partitions when the PC is powered down.
Drive letters are a virtual Windows artefact , an entry in the registry of the running OS.
Hence when you boot your second OS, its "map" of which partition/device has which letter is totally independent of, and couldn't give a fig about, what your other Windows think they should be called.
Vista onwards will always install the new OS as "C" in its own mind if you are doing the installation from a booted DVD, though if you run setup on the DVD from a running copy of Windows, it will be obliged (the same letter cannot appear twice in the registry of the open OS) to choose the first unallocated letter, in its registry.
All of my Windows (7,8.1,10) are "C" when running, but of course cannot be "C" when viewed from the other OSs
That's all perfectly normal Windows behaviour.
EasyBCD creates a few small files in order to function (mostly copies of essential boot files placed where they must be located, not necessarily where they would be in a single-boot). Most of what you quote is not the product of EasyBCD.
Why are you bothering to clean up ?
.BAK files are what the name suggests, and generally unused unless a problem requires whatever created them to recover itself from an error state.
Disk clean up will generally remove all such which are no longer needed, without you needing to research them individually.