i installed xp pro 64 on a sata drive, and vista ultimate 32 on an ide drive in a master/slave configuration with a dvd drive. whenever i booted up, i got to a screen where it said "choose an operating system to start" and gave me the choices "windows vista" and "earlier versions of windows." both choices worked. however, i didnt like vista so while i was logged on xp pro, i formatted the drive with vista on it. xp pro still boots up but i always get the screen where i have to choose which OS i want to boot up from, and i was wondering fi anyone hwere knew how to remove it.

much thanks

Your BIOS sees the primary IDE hard drive as a boot device even though you deleted the Vista OS from it. Remove the IDE HD as the primary IDE device. Try using the dvd drive as primary and the same IDE HD as the secondary IDE drive. Then format the IDE drive as a slave.

Or, a better suggestion, simply do a repair on XP to restore it's bootloader. Formatting the drive Vista was installed on doesn't get rid of Vista's bootloader... and that's why you're still getting the choice menu before XP loads.

Something even easier, use Vista Boot Pro... you should be able to remove the Vista entry from the loader and boot directly to XP without formatting or repairing.

the code insinde the boot record determines which OS loader to start. You can change it back to XPs original by using the fixboot command from the recovery console. This way it will start ntldr straight away

thanks for all the advice, and an infinite amount of thanks to all of you

how would i go about changing the boot record or restore the bootloader?

Simplest method is to download and install Vista Boot Pro. That will enable you to edit Vista's boot the way you would edit boot.ini in Win XP. You simply remove the entry for Vista and set the time for the list of operating systems to be displayed to 0... then you're all set.