Oops, I have dual boot?

[Banana]

This is wordy and I apologize in advance

I wiped my Dell laptop's hard drive to remove the hidden partition by booting with a WinXP CD. I deleted all existing partitions to leave one big unpartitioned space.

(Prior to the next step, I did NOT create any partition.) I then re-formatted with NTFS and reinstalled windows.

Now whenever I turn on the lappy, I get two OS choices. Both are WinXP Home. When I choose the first one, I boot normally. Choosing the second one would result in a failed boot ("hardware not configured etc"). I'm wondering if by not creating a partition before I reformatted, somehow remnants of previous OS was left on the HD?

Anyway, I rechecked the partitions and there is one partition that takes up all but 8MB of the HD. The 8MB piece is identified as unused or unpartitioned.

So, how do I get rid of the dual boot?

 

[Banana]

OK, I found a way to get around my problem in this thread.

But how did I get dual boot in the first place? And will it be harmful to leave it the way it is?

 

[wiredspider]

basically i was going to tell you about the 2 things already mentioned in the other thread...
i have some ideas on how it may have happened, if you started the install while in the old OS, then you rebooted and did the install off the cd instead of choosing the install option once it booted to that menu. have you looked into the boot.ini file and see that they point to the same or different locations? i don't think it it will cause any particular harm, but it is probably annoying to see everytime you boot, so i would use one of the remedies in the other thread.

 

[MrChad]

This is a common problem when reinstalling XP or 2000. There's no harm in leaving the second operating system entry in your boot.ini file, but it's pretty easy to remove as well.