Windows XP Install Issue

[heresiarh]

Hi,

I wanted to reinstall windows on my machine and ended up installing windows xp twice. i did not do a boot cd option instead ran setup from within windows. now whenever i boot up my machine i get a screen asking me to choose windows xp installation one or 2. there is nothign wrong with my machine. i was wondering how to delete the newer installation?

 

[Gage8]

did you install it in a separate partition?

 

[heresiarh]

yes it was installed on D:\. i did not choose any partition. windows installation did it by itself. the reason i did not choose a partition is because i wanted to install over the old one, but apparently did not.

 

[Gage8]

use fdisk to format that other partion. Or boot with your xp cd and it will ask which directory to install to. Choose the one you want to format and it will do a quick format. After it has done that, reboot before it installs the os again.

 

[heresiarh]

If I keep both windows on seperate partitions, will it harm my system in any way?

 

[Gage8]

no, you will have two installs, each on it's own partition. They won't harm each other. You will just always have to choose which one to boot into.
If you delete the one in "D" you can use that to store data - a good practice when you need to reinstall. I keep all my data on a D partion and have my os Ghosted with Norton Ghost. When I want to reinstall it is a 10 min process.

 

[heresiarh]

good, i thought i messed it up. im not exactly a windows expert, im a mac user so still getting used to xp.

 

[Gage8]

welcom back to the light

 

[Smilin]

click start | run and type "notepad \boot.ini"

It will look something like this (without the line numbers)
1. [boot loader]
2. timeout=30
3. default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
4. [operating systems]
5. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
6. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect


You will notice that the numbers in parenthesis in line 3 match either line 5 or line 6. Delete the line 5 OR 6 that does not match line 3.

In my case I would delete line 6 since the partition(1) doesn't match.

That should do it for you.

 

[heresiarh]

what would be the purpose of that?