How to get rid of boot screen?

neo

Member
Hi,
Short history.
I bought dell laptop with Vista.
Some of my programs didn't like it so I installed XP and used EasyBCD for boot menu options.
Worked fine, but then I returned Vista as it was not much of use and replaced with XP clean install with format.
Now I see two XP, one replacing the vista system and another xp that I installed in another partition.
So, I deleted the XP that I installed in another partition.
Now I have only one OS that is XP in the machine that originally had Vista.
I still see the easybcd boot menu asking me to choose between the new xp and old xp that doesn't work.
So I tried to install easybcd again so that i can delete any boot sequence thingy but it complains that it needs vista mbr from vista dvd that i already returned.
How can I get rid of easybcd boot menu?
thank you for advice
 
Hi Neo, welcome to the forum.
EasyBCD is a Vista BCD editor, and though it will execute on XP (with NET 2.0), it no longer has anything to edit on your system.
You are now back to XPs boot loader NTLDR, which refers to boot.ini for its information on what to boot and where to find it.
Nice thing is that boot.ini is a lot easier to edit than BCD, so all you need is notepad.
Make sure you have hidden files and system files displaying (in folder options) and just open C:\boot.ini (assuming your new system is on C:\) with Notepad or Wordpad or your favourite editor.
You can either delete the entry for the system you no longer have, or set default to the one you want and timeout to 0. Either will mean you'll no longer see a boot menu, just go straight into your new XP.
I believe you can also edit it using msconfig boot tab, but I'm on Vista at the moment not XP so I can't check.
 
Last edited:
Hi Terry,
Thanks.
Great!!!
I know how to edit boot.ini. I had to play with it a lot when I finally made vista and xp work together (with easybcd - same concept).
I just thought it was easybcd doing it since i started with it.
Thanks for reminding.
I had this in boot.ini
------
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect
------
The "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" one is the new install on C:
My C: is partition 2 as partition 1 was the initial vista recovery partition that now is a file storage partition.

I changed it to
-----
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
---------
Now it is directly booting to XP on C:
Thanks for the tip Terry.
P.S. Does it matter if C: is not the 1st partition? I'm just wondering if the HD has to work extra to go back and forth to access files in partition that is before OS and another partition that is after OS.
 
Last edited:
The outside of the disk is travelling fastest, so data transfer from there will be quicker than from the centre, but, the OS is not usually transferring huge amounts of data when it's running, so seek times to the next block it wants are probably most important. Keeping your disk defragged will probably gain you more than moving the OS to the rim of the disk.
I've got Vista as C on the outside, and XP as D next in, but I can't say I notice any appreciable delay in anything I do on either, so in your position I'd leave things alone.
If you've only got the one disk, the outside would be quite a good place to put your pagefile ( It moves great chunks of memory in and out of RAM so fast transfer is good), but if you've got a second hard disk, the pagefile would do better on there, where it has no head contention with the OS.

To avoid head thrashing from the 1st to the 3rd partition, just try to plan what goes in each, so that you don't have a need to be accessing them simultaneously. e.g. avoid installing software in one that requires data from the other. One could be used as a backup partition for example, so that you only access it when you're doing your housekeeping before shutdown and most of the day it doesn't get used.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top