Urgent Please Help

Hi,

After a few problems I have finally completely reinstalled windows so i can start afresh, however it lists another partition (on the secondary disk) as the boot/system disk and i cannot change the drive letter (it is defaulting to c)

the current operating system is installed on the d: drive (1st partition of the primary hardrive) due to me having a few problems and trying to repair the install before this reinstall i also get a screen before windows loads asking me to choose which version of windows xp i would like to load. (the first one in the list is the one that i want to use, and i want to remove the other 2 entries...)

any help would be greatly appreciated :)

ian

Boot.ini is the file you want to make changes to. At the command prompt type bootcfg /query to display all the current operating systems in your boot.ini. Then its case of using the bootcfg /delete /id numberhere to delete out the entries you don't want :) So you would want to I imagine
use:

bootcfg /delete /id 2

to delete the second entry and then the same command again to delete the third entry which would be:

bootcfg /delete /id 3

If you do happen to delete out the entry for the operating system you do want to use, don't panic, restart and use recovery console on the xp cd and type fixboot and all will be well once more.

I can't find my boot.ini file anywhere on my hard drive, I suspect its a protected file. So this is the only method I can think of to edit it. Back in the days of windows 98 and 2000 you could edit this file manually.

awesome thanks for that will have a bash immediately :)

ian

ok heres the story

i have just done a whole fresh install of windows, and created a new restore point before i did anything.

i changed the drive letters to how i like them

restarted

installed the nvidia motherboard drivers (direct from www.nvidia.com)

restart

and it now says 'NTLDR' is missing - i have hardly done anything and it is chucing errors at me - not a happy bunny :(

any advice?

ian

Do the fixmbr thing noted above. There is another command that helps with these things too - something like fixboot (I can't remember for sure).

i have just checked the harddrive setup thing on bart (from pebuilder) and well it lists ntldr as being on the booting drive i am very mystified, i am just just doing the fixboot thing etc now so ill get back to you to let you know how it goes

fixboot didnt work, and i didnt want to do any fixmbr as i have 3 partitions on each of the harddrive each with vital data on so i dont want to go messing with those

cheers

ian

ok and now it is working :s this is confusing as hell

ian

just for future reference, sometimes you can get the NTLDR message if you have discs in your drives. Happened to me at work, and when I was on the phone to tech support they asked "do you have any discs in your drives" so I removed them and the problem went away :)

strangely, what i have found out on this bizarre thing is that, the NTLDR error message is only showing up when I DONT have the windows xp install disk in the cd drive, when it is in there it boots up normally (if i dont press any key when it asks me to)

ian

i think i know what the problem is tho...

its the drivers for my motherboard conflicting with the latest bios:
A8N-SLI Deluxe Bios version 1016
Please do read the description before updating BIOS
To avoid crashing file system, please do update the chipset driver to below version prior to this Bios.
For WinXP 32bit system, please download and update chipset drivers V6.65 or later
For WinXP 64bit system, please download and update chipset drivers V6.65 or later
For Win2k/2003 32bit system, please download and update chipset drivers V6.66 or later
For Win2003 64bit system, please download and update chipset drivers V6.66 or later
1- Support new CPUs. Please refer to our website at: http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx
2- Update awdflash.exe to v1.14
3- Remove 2.88MB floppy item value

Ian

QUICK HELP PLEASE :)

How can I boot into the dos or command prompt (non windows) without a floppy drive to update my bios (or downgrad e it in this case)

Help asap much appreciated :)

Ian

I was out after you posted that message yesterday, I've replied to your PM not long ago.