Hey all i have 2 hard drives and recently have had 2 versions of windows installed, today i formatted the 2 hard drive and then rebooted but the boot manager still says i have 2 installed!! I click on the one that has been removed and says no windows found and the other loads up fine! Is there anyway i can sort this out?
If you can get into dos... format /mbr or fdisk /mbr should do the trick. although I thought you said you formatted both drives? I guess you missed one.
Trying this says invalid parameters and is not recognized. Dome this by going to run and typing cmd.exe
What has happened is XP Pro was on my C drive and Windows Vista Beta on my D drive, therefore a new boot manager was created by vista. I have formatted my D drive since and the newer version of the boot manager still thinks that the windows vista on the D Drive is still installed! I have tried booting from my XP disk gone in to Recovery console and typing FIXMBR, went through ok and restarted. But nothing has changed, the boot manager thinks vista is still installed!!
roops. I forgot to tell you to press f8 while booting to get the safemode boot screen, and choose DOS MODE. Then type it from there. Just like this: fdisk /mbr or format /mbr Usually this will fix 'er right up, because windows will boot the first bootable partition by default. However, it sometimes has been known to make the computer unbootable. At which point, you'd need to have something like a UBUNTU or MEPIS or LINSPIRE disc to boot with so that you could back up your goodies and reformat. You could also try going to start/run and typing in "msconfig" (if you can actually get it to boot...try safemode from that screen after pressing f8), and going to the "boot.ini" screen. The last entry should be your bootloader and the third one should be your partition info...of course you'd need to know how to change it.
or you could run msconfig, goto boot.ini and click check all boot paths. Its what i did when i removed my recovery partition but it kept saying it was still there.
This is going to be harder than i thought!!!! All of these replies, which are all good, are not working! I have just downloaded hex editor to try and modifie the boot.ini file but dont know how if anyone knows how please explain how
DO NOT use that hex editor on boot ini. If you can boot into windows @ all, go to start/run and type in "msconfig"...there's a boot.ini tab there. And doing what andrew said would probably be safest.
I have done what Andrew had put and all i got was this message: 'It appears that all BOOT.INI lines for microsoft operating systems are OK' but still asks which version of windows it wants me to load up even though there's only one OS installed!
This is whats in my boot.ini file: - ; ;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems. ;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options. ; [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN Can someone please tell me how to Get rid of the boot manager so when windows boots up it doesnt ask me which windows to load when only 1 windows is installed!!
Hey there, I did the same thing and didn't really care until I wanted to load Fedora Core onto my hard drive and relized after I formatted it that I couldn't get rid of the boot loader from windows vista. First off, Vista is using a new loader from microsoft that has nothing to do with the boot.ini file so you cannot get rid of it using the msconfig "Check all Paths" or by editing the boot.ini file and that's why there is only one line for your XP operating system. Vista comes equiped with a program called Bootsect that allows you to modify the boot, but you deleted that when you formatted so here is what you want to do. TO GET RID OF THE WINDOWS VISTA BOOT LOADER AFTER FORMAT: 1) Boot up XP and put your Windows Vista install dvd into your dvd-rom drive. 2) Start > Run > cmd.exe 3) In the command prompt enter this magical line [bold]Drive:\Boot\Bootsect.exe -NT52 All[/bold] (Replace Drive with your dvd-rom location ie F:\Boot\Bootsect.exe - NT52 All) 4) This switches your boot loader back to the XP boot loader which can be modified in the boot.ini 5) Next time you start up your PC the boot loader will be gone. Have a great day, Shaun
I installed Vista beta 2 but it runs really slow on my machine. I decided to put xp back on by doing a clean install, wiping vista totaly, but i need to boot from my DVD drive. It won't let me boot from the dvd drive when i put the xp install CD in even though i selected it from the boot menu. It just goes into Windows as normal. I can boot from my DVD drive using the Vista install CD as if i was going to reinstall it again, but i want xp back. How do i boot from the DVD drive with my XP install CD? Cheers John.
