O/S Question

Choate

New Member
Well i found out what was wrong with my hp the O/S i have on a disc is corrupt. I found this out by installing it on this computer. Every time i boot up this computer it automatically chooses the other O/S and then it has an error. How do i remove it?

Any help is appreciated, Thank You
 
That will depend on What OS(operating system) you are talking about. It sounds like it was setup originally for dual booting two different ones and the boot loader needs to be corrected. The second OS was set as the default explaining why it continues to try to load the version not currently installed.
 
well it give me a choice to pick one or the other but i only have 5 seconds to do it then it chooses it. (XP Pro)
 
i have xp home and xp pro, xp pro is corrupt and every time i try to load it it says there are errors. i want to remove xp pro without formatting my drive so that it wont be on the list of O/S's to choose from when booting up
 
The manual edit of the boot.ini file found at the root of C can easily be done. First you have to be quick enough with the up or down key to highlight the XP Home choice and press the enter to the Home version loaded. If that is on the second partition oops! You'll spend a day trying move it back to the front of the drive after the Pro primary is removed.

With the desktop reached you would go to the MyComputer or go into "Programs>Accessories" right off of the Start menu and open a window up. Once there open the tools>folder options menu to open the view tab seen there and uncheck the "hide protected system files" option and click apply to see that put into effect. http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/6905/unhidesystemfilessd4.jpg

Once this is done the boot.ini file will appear as a dim folder at the root of the hard drive where you right click on that to uncheck the hidden or read only box and click apply for this as well. Now notepad or another text editor can be used to remove the "
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect" item there and save the file in the same using the "all files" not text option. This would be done if the XP Home installation is on the first not second partition since the Pro version seems to take charge over the Home edition when installed affterwards.
 
i want to remove xp pro without formatting my drive so that it wont be on the list of O/S's to choose from when booting up
Unless they are installed on separate paritions which i dont imagine you've done, you'll need to edit the boot ini file as PC Eye has posted. You wont be able to actually remove the OS short of formatting
 
Unfortunately everytime I try to post the line of text directly from the boot.ini file when opened by notepad you can see where the "microsoft" becomes "Micro soft". Perhaps a good screen shot like the here will explain how the default boot.ini should look when corrected. The default boot.ini should appear just as seen here with a 30 second delay time.



You can see by the background that the file is also accessible while running Vista on a second drive here simply using notepad. You allow the corrections to be saved by overwriting the original file this way if you are not able to get to the XP Home desktop there.

Your other option is to boot up with the XP installation disk to the recovery console and enter two commands at the prompt if the changes made still fail to see the Home version load. The "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands are entered there. The last two options before a reformat would be the repair install or deletion of the current to see the Home as the stand alone.
 
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