after a failed XP reinstall attempt, how do I lose that choice?

drumtrucker

Active Member
Been running XP/Vista VHP32 dual boot for a while.

Been having some XP issues and was trying to reinstall (with repair option) but install failed and NOW..
everytime I reboot I have a 3rd choice of boot to XP installation.

and.. when I chose XP op system I have to choose again, between XP and XP installation.

When I run EasyBCD, the XP installation choice is NOT there, I was hoping I could just remove it in there.
 
The extra choice will be in your boot.ini file on the partition marked as "system" "active".
Vista's bootmgr chains to NTLDR to boot XP and NTLDR reads boot.ini. It's in there that entries for multiple XP installations are kept.
The XP entry in the BCD just tells bootmgr where to find the XP boot files. They, in turn, locate the XP system(s)
Just delete the extra unwanted entry in boot.ini.
 
err??
I have 2 operating systems in XP side, I think, virtually identical, but not sure how I should handle. The attachment entitled shows other OP sys title.
 

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when i poked around on how to edit boot.ini i stumbled accross instruction on how to use cmd line commands: bootcfg /delete /id 2
worked for me, although it made me nervous when I rebooted and window default was listed instead of Windows Vista.
I went into EasyBCD and 'saved' the settings in there and when rebooted, things seem to be back to normal.

Now I if I could just get XP to boot quickly, like it used to, I'd be able to go to bed

Addendum:

well I was wrong, the choices are messed up, but only when I try to boot to xp,
how do I FIX the first disk (of 3) so things are back to normal?
 
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Don't mess around with the BCD for your XP problems (though you can use EasyBCD "change settings" to change the description of your Vista system back to what you want).
Just use wordpad to edit boot.ini and make it look like the example in the wiki (with only one entry in the [operating system] section of course), where the default entry and the main entry both point to the appropriate rdisk() and partition() for your XP
 
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