Boot option gone -- Help!

[FrankCross]

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.

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!

 

[JustinW]

If you have an XP disc, boot from it and go to the recovery console. Run "fixmbr" and reboot.

 

[FrankCross]

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

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]

Post a screenshot of Disk Management and we'll advise how to get back from where you are to vanilla XP.

 

[JustinW]

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.

 

[FrankCross]

Thanks again for the reply, but I found this article was much easier to follow and actually made sense, versus making a seemingly logical choice in EasyBCD and having it turn my PC into an expensive paperweight.

How do I remove boot choices that I no longer want?

I guess it still pays to do things manually.

 

[Terry60]

Editing boot.ini is not the problem you described, and has absolutely nothing to do with EasyBCD.