Hard Drive Problem?

[CrowDog]

I just got a used hdd today off the fs/t forums here, its a Maxtor 11.5 gig. I put it in and installed Win XP pro. During set up it asked if I wanted to convert from fat32 to ntfs so I did and continued the setup of windows. It installed ok and now it boots, but during boot it asks me what OS I want to boot. It lets me choose from "Windows" and "Windows XP Pro". Why is it asking me this after a clean install? Ive checked the HD in windows explorer and all I see is win xp files. All I have is XP pro...why would it ask me to choose what one to boot?

-Thanks

 

[RemyCanad]

Sounds like there is a boot manager in the master boot record. If you boot from a floppy and type "format C: /mbr" it will format the master boot record. I don't remeber but you might have to format the whole driver after that.

Well before that what kind of a menu is it? Is it from windows xp?

 

[CrowDog]

I have a bad floppy controller on the mobo so I cant use a floppy....thats why Im using XP so I can just boot from cd drive.

I cant tell what kind of menu it is....Im guessing a win xp menu.

 

[RemyCanad]

It sounds like win xp found another os, or what it thinks is another os, on your hd. Did you by chance do a full format of the drive before you installed winxp?

Have you tried the windows option to see what it does?

 

[CrowDog]

nothing seems to happen when I try the "windows" one. I guess I will just try reformating it. Im not sure what happend but I think it just converted to ntfs and then installed, rather than... converting, formating, installing.

 

[Colt45]

did you format C: with the "/s" switch?

when i did that, windows XP (it hink 2k as well) recognizes the DOS boot files (msdos.sys, io.sys, and command.com) as another OS. (which it is)

no big deal either way. theres somewhere in windows where you can disable the other boot option anyways.

 

[CrowDog]

Ok,

So I guess I got ebough info to figure it out. I will probaly set in options to just boot win xp all the time and not show the list. My main concern I guess is there was something wrong with the drive.