[Installation/Uninstallation] Problems with two ubuntus

[Prasanna]

Greetings,

I had the earlier LTS 6.06 Dapper Drake installed on my desktop.  Out
of sheer vanity for the latest and greatest version of firefox I
upgraded to LTS 8.04 Hardy Heron. This, after lots of problems while
installing gtk-2.0 which firefox-3.0 needed.  

So, all went fine except at the end, the installation kept repeatedly
prompting about dependency problems, lot of post-installation scripts
had not run properly and packages were eventually left unconfigured.
This had happened to >1000 packages. After scourging through forums
and mailing lists and running "dpkg --configure -a" multiple times I
stumbled upon a dselect based solution that removed most of the
critical packages. Damn! My fault really. I had never figured out that
program, but desperation got the better of me. So the internet was
disconnected, apt was uninstalled and no vim was found.

The only solution (I could see) to bring the system back to working
state was to reinstall the whole OS on a free partition and mount the
older system from there and recover my data. Voila! It worked and now
I've got firefox-3.0. But the problem now is, I want to reclaim the
space that contains the incomplete installation. This old ubuntu still
shows up (and boots) from the new bootloader. I don't just want to get
rid of the listing in the bootloader, I want to reclaim the space.

Could I just mount the old partition and delete the files and reuse
the space? Will that cause any problems with the bootloader
configuration?

If not, does anyone have any idea how to do this?

I hope I was clear. Any help in this regard would be appreciated.

-- 
vogon at earth.org.,
"Resistance is useless!"