[smashclash]

I just bought a new dell laptop. It came with XP home edition but I have an XP professional edition from a desktop i bought a year ago. i went to install the pro edition on the new laptop and deleted all the old partitions and choose to the long erase (not quick) to get rid of the old stuff and install the pro edition. well, now everythign is installed but everytime i reboot i get the option for which OS to start... professional or home. This is really annoying and i only want it to start the professional. I thought i deleted the home edition and if i choose the home edition to load i get this: "windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware config problem. could not read from the selected boot disk. check boot path and disk hardware..."

What the..., why won't home just go away and let me go about my normal business with Pro?

Any suggestions?

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You could not possible have erased the partitions and have the boot.ini file survive


Looking at MY COMPUTER, how many local drives do you see?

[gerryf]

You could not possible have erased the partitions and have the boot.ini file survive


Looking at MY COMPUTER, how many local drives do you see?

[smashclash]

You could not possible have erased the partitions and have the boot.ini file survive
Looking at MY COMPUTER, how many local drives do you see?

that's what i would think. i am only showing 1 hard disk drive local C: the only other drive is D: which is the dvd/cd rom.

would deleting the partitions and reinstalling everything again do the trick?

[gerryf]

really, all you have to do is delete one line in boot.ini and the menu will go away...I am just wondering how boot.ini could survice a partition deletion and reformatting.

Right click MY COMPUTER, choose PROPERTIES, ADVANCED, startup and recover settings, and click the EDIT button.

post the file contents that open in notepad.

[smashclash]

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=signature(d0f4738c)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
signature(d0f4738c)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

[gerryf]

make a backup of the boot.ini file

delete this line
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Now this is interesting
signature(d0f4738c)disk.....

what laptop is this? Do you have, perhaps, one of those laptops with RAID array, but set up with only a single drive? Never saw that on a laptop before....

[audioboy]

I have noticed the same thing, the boot.ini survives when using a windows install disk to reformat a drive. they always keep a small portion of the drive that you cant access (on my last scratch load, it was only 8mb, but I ended up with the choose OS to boot screen).
editing the boot.ini is the fix. another trick is to just turn down the timeout counter to 1-2 seconds, then you dont really notice it.

[BePro]

I dont know if a Dell is similar to my Sony Vaio, but I had XP Home on mine. The XP Recovery Files were in a partition (5GB) that you could not normally get into. I wanted to put XP Pro on mine, and had similar problems with the dual OS boot.

So what I do is somewhat a long route, but works for me.

1. I get a Win98 CD. I boot from it, and choose CDROM support. Once the command prompt shows, I use FDISK to wipe out any partitions on the drive, and then I repartition it to the way I want it.

2. I reboot the computer and install Win98. My XP pro wont run setup from boot, so I have to install Win98 first, then upgrade to XP Pro. If you have an XP Pro CD that will install from boot, then you can skip this step and boot the computer with the XP Pro CDROM.

3. I upgrade Win98 with XP Pro. After doing this, I have a fresh copy of Win Xp installed, and dont have any side effects that occur when going from XP home to Pro, or reinstalling Pro from Pro when your computer gets too messy.

If you dont understand something here, just ask and I will explain in more detail.