XP reinstall causes OS menu to come up (Home/Pro).....

[redgtxdi]

So I fixed this PC and formatted & reinstalled XP. Well, going from Home to Pro, leaves a menu on starts........(choose which OS to boot from).

I already did the msconfig.exe to boot.ini and was able to eliminate the path for the Home OS (as it's not there anymore anyway) but then it only works on "selective startup". If I try to tick back to "Normal startup", then it goes back to the OS choices.

OK, so that's no biggie.........EXCEPT......reason for the repair on this PC was it was riddled with viruses & spyware.

Do I wanna use something like "killdisk" to completely wipe the whole disk including the boot record (I've read before that some viruses can camp out in the boot record & reinstall if only doing a 'regular' format/reinstall).

Or is the regular XP format good enough to have cleaned any of that??? (Then just leave it on "selective startup", I suppose, eh??)

TIA :thumbsup:

 

[Smilin]

IIRC Windows setup will make a note of boot.ini entries and preserve them. It's possible for entries to survive a format in this way.

If you know your boot.ini is ok, just drop the menu wait time down to like 1-3 seconds and let it do it's thing.

Boot sector & bios viruses are the only thing that can survive a format. Unlike spyware and rootkits these are very very easy to detect so if you formatted and then put AV software on after the reinstall you should be fine.

 

[DaiShan]

Paste the boot.ini here and I'll (or someone else) will fix it for you. I just did a clean install of a machine today and had the same thing happen (choose which install)

 

[MX2]

Use FDISK/mbr to rebuild the master boot record.

 

[redgtxdi]

OK, well here's what I did.........(fdisk/mbr didn't work )

msconfig.exe, boot.ini, search all paths...........that prompts XP to find the 'home' path which didn't work. Prompts me if I want to eliminate it, yes, it does, done.

Next I also searched for boot.ini

(I can't remember how to find boot.ini any "regular" way, anybody help an old fart on that one?)

Anyway.......XP found boot.ini.backup. Opened it up in Notepad & edited the path I didn't want.

THEN (& only after I did *both*) I rebooted & all was fine. To make sure I went to msconfig.exe and ticked "Normal Startup" and rebooted & it was still fine. So that old Home path is officially gone!

Lastly I'm running AVG just to make sure it didn't carry over any viruses in the boot record.

Thanks again all!! :thumbsup:

 

[MiranoPoncho]

why not run a msconfig, set the default os and reboot?

 

[redgtxdi]

That's basically what I did, but in this case I had to change the boot.ini file in both aspects. (It's like it backs up its backup.)

Anyway........the simple way is to do msconfig.exe & let it eliminate the unrouted OS, but that will leave the default "General" tab to "Selective Startup". That's all fine & dandy, but I wouldn't ever want the user coming back to me & complaining about anything to do with the selective start when they decided to install their uber-new webcam with bootup properties.

Thus & so, my method which worked to eliminate the bad OS file path completely!

Voila!

 

[cleverhandle]

I haven't looked at this in a while, but can't you just edit boot.ini directly and delete the stale entry? IIRC it's a hidden file in C:

 

[JB1592]

This happens because the Windows install routine checks for other installed operating systems before it asks you where to install and whether to format. If you install to the same drive as a previous Windows install it'll still setup the boot menu as if the old Windows was still there. I guess you already realized that much, huh?

The way I usually work around this (as opposed to all the stuff you did to eliminate the incorrect Windows from the boot menu) is to delete the Windows partition when it gives me the option to, then abort the install and restart. Now when it checks for previously installed versions of Windows the old one will already be gone and I can recreate the partition and install without having to edit the boot menu later.

I don't think the end result is really any different, I just think this way is a little easier.

 

[DaiShan]

Boot.ini is a hidden folder on the root of the C:\ drive. To view this folder you must first enable the option to view hidden operating system files under Tools -> folder options -> view. Then you can right click on boot.ini and select the edit option. The file is very straight forward and follows the same format as you see on the OS menu. For example if you have 2 entries on your OS menu and you would like to remove the second option, simply remove the second line in the boot.ini file.

 

[Brazen]

Just do Start > Run... and then run this: "notepad c:\boot.ini" and edit it directly.