Removing MBR item?

[Red]

My new computer came with XP Home... I formatted the harddrive and installed XP Pro. Now when my computer boots it asks me if I want XP Pro or Home to launch...even though Home doesn't exist anymore. How do I get rid of it and make it boot to Pro automatically?

 

[NuclearFusi0n]

fdisk /mbr

IIRC

 

[Red]

Will that remove my winxp pro too? Or just home?

 

[Nothinman]

That won't fix anything. Edit c:\boot.ini

 

[capybara]

i tried this on win2k and winnt and win95
fdisk/mbr
fdisk/?
boot ini
boot/?
none of these are valid commands

 

[Nothinman]

boot.ini is a file not a command.

fdisk is a command /mbr is a switch to that command.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That won't fix anything. Edit c:\boot.ini

Like he said. People seem to think the MBR is a lot more complex than it actually is. 512 bytes, people - that's all you've got in the MBR. There's no space for cute little interactive menus there. Heck, at 1 byte/char there would barely be enough space just to store the messages you see, much less include code to boot anything. The only thing the MBR does is read the partition table and pass off boot control to a "Stage 2" (sometimes "Stage 1.5") boot loader on one of the partitions. DOS/Windows MBR's do this by looking for the "active" (or "bootable") flag and send boot control to that partition's loader. Linux/Unix MBR's have a particular partition coded into them at install time.

Either way, if you're at the point of having a menu or any interactive control whatsoever, you're not talking about the MBR anymore. You need to edit the Stage 2 boot loader configuration (lilo.conf, boot.ini, etc.).