An option too many

Q.

I have Windows XP running on my machine and recently tried to install another copy of it on a separate partition of my hard drive, but the installation process was interrupted midway. Now, whenever I boot up my PC, I see a menu which lists two separate Windows XP installations, out of which only one works. How do I get rid of the invalid reference?

A.

To remove the reference which points to the corrupted Windows XP installation so that it no longer appears when you boot up, you have two options. Of these, the first simply prevents the boot menu from appearing every time at startup and lets you boot directly into Windows XP, while the second lets you actually remove the invalid entry.

To disable the boot menu, right-click 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'. On the tab labelled 'Advanced', click the 'Settings' button under 'Startup and Recovery'. Now, in the section labelled 'System Startup', simply uncheck the option that says Time to display list of operating systems'. Alternatively, you could go a little further and manually edit the Boot.ini file to purge the invalid entry. To do so, under the aforementioned 'System Startup' section, click the button labelled 'Edit'. This will open the Boot.ini file in Notepad, ready for editing. However, before making any changes, as a precautionary measure, backup this file by clicking 'File', followed by the 'Save As' option in Notepad. As an example, a sample Boot.ini is provided below:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)

rdisk (0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partiti on(l)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(O)partiti on(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition" /fastdetect

A cursory examination of the file above reveals that the bottom reference is false and the system will automatically load Windows XP present on partition 1 after the 30 second timeout. So you can safely delete the entire second reference (shown in bold). Note that the actual contents of the Boot.ini file may vary from this slightly, so proceed with caution. Once you are done, save the changes, exit and restart your system to boot directly into Windows.