Overly Chatty Penguins

The Ready Room => Off Topic => Topic started by: Manta on August 23, 2006, 08:48:02 PM

Title: Multiple Windows OSes
Post by: Manta on August 23, 2006, 08:48:02 PM: A few months ago, I bought an HP dv5000 laptop. Of course, it came preinstalled with tons of stuff I would never use, but couldn't delete. I lived with it.

Fast forward to today. I got pretty sick of all the clutter, so I decided to format my hard drive and install with the XP Media Center CD that came with the computer. Anyway, a few hours later, I restart after installing the OS and drivers and find that instead of going straight to the "Welcome" screen, I'm looking at a menu telling me to choose which OS to boot: XP Media Center, or XP Pro.

The fact that the clutter on my hard drive was never removed and was simply reinstalled with the OS I'll deal with, but I'm not sure what to do about this. Anyone know?
Title: Multiple Windows OSes
Post by: Fewlio on August 24, 2006, 11:04:01 AM: Format Disk!
Title: Multiple Windows OSes
Post by: Nuketheplace on August 24, 2006, 01:42:18 PM: Yah you forgot to format the disk. I did that once. Need to reformat and then reinstall windows. If you just reinstall everything will still be there.
Title: Multiple Windows OSes
Post by: GrayDuck on August 24, 2006, 04:29:56 PM: nooo don't start over! You don't have to, although you have a choice, you can (probably) only boot into one of the options.

Edit your C:\boot.ini - you'll have two lines that look similar to this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Delete the one you don't need, save, and your problem is gone.

You don't have two OS's installed... I'm not sure why the boot.ini remembers your previous version of windows. I've run into this a couple times...
Title: Multiple Windows OSes
Post by: Manta on August 24, 2006, 09:37:29 PM: I definitely formatted the disk. I think it's just the OS CD. Your way worked out though, GrayDuck, so I think it's fine now.