Boot option gone -- Help!

I have Windows XP Home Edition. Yesterday I created another partition and installed Windows 7 just to test a couple Directx10 games, and ended up wanting to get rid of it and go back to a single partition of XP. After formatting and deleting the second partition, I wanted to remove the option to boot into Windows 7, so I downloaded EasyBCD. Granted, I'm new to the program, but I'm very careful with options that might royally mess up my PC and I could have SWORN I chose to delete the Windows 7 boot option--not the XP one.

Lo and behold, I cannot boot into XP. All that shows on the menu is the useless Windows 7 option. I have a ton of important files on my primary partition and reformatting is seriously the last thing I want to do. :frowning:

I'm sure there's a relatively easy way to get my XP option back in the boot menu, I just don't have much experience with this kind of problem. If anyone could please explain it to me I would be very grateful!
 
Hi, thanks for your reply. Using information I found on a number of websites, I tried your method as well as others involving the command line. None of it worked.

What did work, however, was recreating the Windows 7 partition and installing it again. Somehow that kicked my "Earlier Version of Windows" option back onto the boot menu and I was able to start XP again. A huge relief :smile:

Unfortunately all my toying with the command line options created a mess of a boot menu, and now I have 3 XP boot options and 2 Windows 7 options. So now I'm back where I started, only more annoying :|

Any tips on how to remove these useless entries without causing a catastrophe?
 

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
Post a screenshot of Disk Management and we'll advise how to get back from where you are to vanilla XP.
 

JustinW

Super Moderator
Staff member
In EasyBCD go to Bootloader Setup > Install Windows XP Bootloader to MBR > Write MBR. On reboot into XP you should be able to delete W7's partition.

You can than use the free space for a new partition or get Partition Wizard and extend XP's partition.
 

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
Editing boot.ini is not the problem you described, and has absolutely nothing to do with EasyBCD.
 
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