gives me two OS options, only 1 installed

[BobMcGee123]

I just re-installed windows and formatted, that wonderful ballet. Everything works fine and peachy, except when the computer is booting up it makes me choose which operating system to boot...and both options are windows XP home, and only the first one actually works.

I just downloaded partition magic to see if perhaps I could glean anything from it...there's my primary partition and a 7.8MB unallocated partition, but that's supposed to be there isn't it? Regardless, partition magic won't let me do anything with the 7.8MB partition, so I need some help getting rid of the second OS option at boot up.

[JaWiB]

You might check in boot.ini. On my computer there's these two lines:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Maybe there's two OSes listed there and you can just delete one?

[BobMcGee123]

Hmm, I cannot find that file (I did a windows search for it, including hidden files and such), where is it located?

Thanks.

[jverkoey]

on your primary hard drive (where windows is installed). It's a hidden file called boot.ini. Open that and I guarantee you it's got both of those listings in there. Remove the one that seems wrong and save the file. (It's read-only by default by the way so you have to change that in the properties dialog by right-clicking the file).

[BobMcGee123]

Hmm, oddly enough it's just under C:\ but you were both correct, here is what it says:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

and deleting the second one accomplished what I wanted. Thanks.