I recently put in a new hard drive and installed windows xp with my original cd. Everything works fine except when the pc starts up it asks which system i want to use. It lists the two systems Windows xp which are identical. This doesn't cause a problem but it delays start up. Is there a way to eliminate that on start up?
Windows XP installed
- Thread starter az1252
- Start date
codeman0013
Active Member
Yep.. click on start then go to run. Type MSCONFIG and hit enter. Then go to the boot.ini tab and there is a button to check boot paths. It should pop up and say one is corrupt and ask if you would like to delete it tell it yes and presto chango no more problem..
Is that a second drive? If so the first installation was detected on the older drive and the entry for that was added into the boot.ini file found at the root of the hard drive.
NotePad can easily be used to remove the second entry once you uncheck the hide protected system files option in the tools>folder option>view section. If the first drive was an ide model while the new one is a sata the boot information went on the ide drive even if Windows was installed to the new drive.
On a new drive with no second drive installed the reference to a second copy of Windows wouldn't be seen since the new drive lacked any previous installation. If there is a first ide drive you would have to unplug that and then boot upto the recovery console for rewritting the mbr with the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands at the command prompt seen there. Then you simply set the new drive as the default boot device in the bios.
NotePad can easily be used to remove the second entry once you uncheck the hide protected system files option in the tools>folder option>view section. If the first drive was an ide model while the new one is a sata the boot information went on the ide drive even if Windows was installed to the new drive.
On a new drive with no second drive installed the reference to a second copy of Windows wouldn't be seen since the new drive lacked any previous installation. If there is a first ide drive you would have to unplug that and then boot upto the recovery console for rewritting the mbr with the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands at the command prompt seen there. Then you simply set the new drive as the default boot device in the bios.
Don't feel bad about seeing the initial problem there. When going to reinstall XP on the first sata here when a board had to be replaced I forgot to unplug the ide drive with Vista on it. The typical C drive was then seen as D with the ntldr and boot.ini as well as msdos.sys and IO.sys files found there.
If the Fixboot and Fixmbr commands were used you might need a repair install if it comes to that. Otherwise you can now work to get the current installation going again. With Vista MS did do one thing right with the automatic startup problems repair tool option seen on the installation disk.
When Vista won't load due to the mishap I had I simply booted upto the first screen and choose the repair tools not the install now option seen in the lower half of the screen. Vista booted normally afterwards.
If the Fixboot and Fixmbr commands were used you might need a repair install if it comes to that. Otherwise you can now work to get the current installation going again. With Vista MS did do one thing right with the automatic startup problems repair tool option seen on the installation disk.
When Vista won't load due to the mishap I had I simply booted upto the first screen and choose the repair tools not the install now option seen in the lower half of the screen. Vista booted normally afterwards.