i only found one post that was somewhat applicable to my issue of removing a dual boot (http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkStation/Thinkstat
the situation: my former IT guys installed W7 Pro x64 (thx, Lenovo, for the free upgrade from Vist Business 
) on a new partition alongside XP Pro x32 and it worked great, but i only kept using XP for my !@#$%^ genius scanner, which i have never gotten to run under XP Mode/Virtual PC in W7.
one day, after several months of XP inactivity, i decided to boot into it for some reason and had a BSOD. so then i set out to just eradicate the offending OS and its partition...simple, right? not in this case. i found the guys had put the W7 OS onto a logical drive not a primary:
Local Disk (C
156.71 GB NTFS
Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Logical Drive)
my boot.ini was on the XP partition and W7 uses bootmgr so i poked around and found that EasyBCD should take care of the issue by copying the boot.ini info to bootmgr on C:\ through this link in the SevenForums:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/209885-bootmg
again, not so easy. i could not move the bootmgr because of the logical status of the partition and also because the partition wasn't set to active; i converted the partition to active with no troubles under the native Disk Managment but failed when i tried to convert the partition to primary.i feared having to do a wipe and reinstall to tidy up as i saw some (forums unnamed) folks advocating.
i looked into it a bit further and found that i needed to use use a partition tool from bootable media (i used a CD with EaseUS Partition Master - the freeware version ) to convert to primary at boot and then i used the above link to copy the bootmgr to C:\ with EasyBCD
now my OS drive looks like so (the partition is large owing to the GIS files that like living there):
Local Disk (C
226.71 GB NTFS
Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
that solved the problem of the W7 OS being on an inactive, logical drive instead of an active primary - and in future if i set up a dual boot for any other OS, i'll make sure the disk is set as primary before i install and the backwater IT guys here will never touch my machine again 
