Vista/XP Dual Boot displays menu twice

phillfri

Member
Had a system crash. Reinstalled Vista and XP from backups (Vista on drive 0, partition 1, XP on drive 0, partition 2). Now when I boot the system the dual boot selection menu comes up, but if I select Windows XP, the dual boot menu comes up again (showing both Vista and XP as choices again), and I have to select XP again. Vista boots fine from the dual boot menu that comes up when I start the machine. Vista won't boot at all from the dual boot menu that comes up after I select XP.

How do I stop Windows XP from trying to dual boot when it starts up?
 
Hi Phill, welcome to NST.
When you select XP it's chaining to NTLDR which reads boot.ini.
NTLDR cannot boot Vista, but people frequently add a Vista entry to its boot.ini in a vain attempt at dual-booting, and it sounds like you've resurrected an old duff version with your restore.
Find the boot.ini on whichever partition is marked "active" in disk management and delete the line refering to Vista and the second menu should stop being presented. (It doesn't get displayed if there's only one system or if the timeout=0)
 
If you open EasyBCD, and go to Tools | Edit Legacy Entries you should see the menu that Terry is referring to.

Welcome to NST, btw.
 
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