Hi!
 
I have a system which used to have dual boot win 7 32bit / 64 bit that I want to upgrade to a single win10 64bit OS.
 
Anyone know how to get rid of the system restore partitions I have on either HD (about 100 GB)?
 
I tried using the win 7 disk manager utility, could delete but not merge it with the rest of the HD ... and also broke the win 7 installation somehow ... so while waiting for suggestions I try a clean win10 installation on one of the HDs

You should be able to do this in Windows - delete restore point.

Win 7 does not have system restore points on a dedicated partition by default. You could set this up, but unless you or your system supplier put restore data on an ordinary data partition, that partition is something else. Deleting the system or boot partition can kill your ability to boot one or both systems, and there is protection from deletion from within Windows.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/what-are-system-boot-partitions#1TC=windows-7
 
If you just want to clean install of Windows 10 on a wiped drive that previously had other stuff on it, you can just delete the partitions during installation from a DVD or thumb drive and let it install to an unpartitioned drive (all free space) and it will create the default partitions for you and let you choose to set up other partitions at the same time. Using the installation key from Win 7 during the Win 10 install will let it activate when connected to the internet anytime after installation. 
http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-clean-install-windows-10/
 
If you are trying to keep everything that you had working on Windows 7 without re-installing then you will need to get Windows 7 working again and run the install from within the old OS pointing it to the current location of the Win 7 system during installation.
 
 

thanks. I meanwhile ran into all of this :-) meaning I killed both systems so that I couldn't boot ... so I restored with old win 7 CDs and went straight to win10 upgrade where I could delete this partitions as you said ...
 
now I just need to reinstall everything - which is a lot of work but I relieves me of 32 bit plugins and other nuisances

Quick clarification please... 100GB or 100MB? Reason I ask is that there is a 100MB partition that contains your master boot record... that partition cannot be "reclaimed" into the main drive partition (on any drive) and is separated for a reason.
 
Before we get caught up in "partition" in a general sense, can you clarify this? The one I am thinking of is often labeled "BOOT" by default to an imaging program (or one that can actually see that partition - it it not view-able with Windows Explorer). Is the partition in question view-able with Windows Explorer?