Any way to get XP to boot into a specific installation every time...

[The Sauce]

Or better yet to just delete out an installation and get XP to forget about it?

I just installed a new drive and in the process had two active partitions with two separate instances of XP running (I know...but it was the only way). Now I have whittled down to one primary partition and one version fo XP but on boot-up, just past POST, it asks me which version of Windows I want to run. It defaults to the wrong one and gives an I/O error and locks (since that partition is gone). This forces me to scroll down and select the other option every time I reboot. Any ideas?

 

[mundane]

I think you can edit the boot.ini file. Remove the invalid [operating systems] entry, and make the the 'default' is pointing to the correct one.

MS reference for boot.ini

 

[apologetic]

Control Panel->System->Advanced->Startup and Recovery Settings->Select your default OS and uncheck the boxes