Very Interesting "XP Home" repeating Boot Problem!!! Help!!!

[Trance183]

I'm sure most have seen this before so I'll make this short. Bought 2 dell PCs. Hate the junk they come preinstalled with. Did a Clean Reinstall with the XP Cds they came with. One was perfect. The other gave me another menu after the BIOS boot asking me to select an OS to boot. I deleted all partitions so I know I only have one copy of XP on the system. I reinstalled again to see if that would fix it. Nope. How do i fix this? i see this alot. It gives me 2 options to boot:

Windows XP Home Edition
Windows XP Home Edition

Now I know one of these is the actual OS, which is the 1st Windows option. The other doesn't boot. How can i fix this so i don't see this black menu again. Its annoying and doesn't allow me to leave my PCs unattended when booting or resarting. Please help you guys.

I know once I get rid of that 2nd option, then the menu won't come up anymore cause it will only have one OS to boot. I'll see what you guys can come up with. THanks.

 

[g-paw]

The only way I know to get rid of this is to do a full format of the drive. If you know what company made the drive, I'd use the setup/diagnostic/repair software from the hdd mfg site. I believe you can also do fdisk, you should be able to download it from the Net. Both usually require a Floppy

 

[edklite]

give me a screenshot of your boot.ini

 

[Trance183]

I just happened to look in the Boot.ini using the MSconfig command and Wallaaaa!!!! It detected a partition 2 that did not contain a valid OS. It asked me if i wanted to delete it. And walla!!!! Thank you so much ed. Easy fix but no where to start. . As you can see i'm still getting the hang of tech. thanks again.

 

[edklite]

good luck boss

it always feels great when you figure it out yourself

 

[g-paw]

I just happened to look in the Boot.ini using the MSconfig command and Wallaaaa!!!! It detected a partition 2 that did not contain a valid OS. It asked me if i wanted to delete it. And walla!!!! Thank you so much ed. Easy fix but no where to start. . As you can see i'm still getting the hang of tech. thanks again.

I'm running Windows 2000 on one machine with the same problem but there was no option to Delete the 2nd partition. I was able to reduce the wait time to 3 seconds, can't reduce it any lower, which definitely helped. Does anyone know how to do this in 2000? On the General page of msconfig there is an option to "Use Original BOOT.INI" but I don't know if the original is for the good, bootable, or bad, non bootable, version of Windows. Thanks

 

[edklite]

edit your boot.ini if you don't know which then post screen-shot of your boot.ini here and as usual always back it up first before you edit it

 

[Trance183]

Yeah, i noticed that it all depends on how that boot.ini file is read by the boot process. like i said mine had 2 OS boots. Partition 1 and partition 2. the wierd thing is i only made one official partition. so where did the 2nd one come from? not sure. but i'm thinking it was just a left over boot file from the first reinstall of windows i did. find your boot.ini file and delete the extra annoying fake OS file(for lack of better word) if you can find it. and walla!!! lol. i also noticed i'm lovin the whole walla!!! thing. it just works. especially if you fix the problem.

 

[g-paw]

edit your boot.ini if you don't know which then post screen-shot of your boot.ini here and as usual always back it up first before you edit it

That did it, thanks

 

[edklite]