Ok boobed on reinstall- is it serious/can someone help me please?

[nimbles]

Hey guys was installing software on my brother's laptop and having installed anti virus office and some other apps, ran a windows update, and went off to do some work, basically the firewall in f-secure had prompted me to allow or deny one of the win update hot fixes to access the net and not realising came back half an hour later to see this permission thing and allowed it but then the update just hung. Anyway rebooted tried update again and it said there was an error with the system clock- tried a few more times, similar errors, then did system restore which uninstalled all the stuff i had installed previously :bawling:- so getting quite annoyed i just decided to do a full clean install.

In hindsight this wasn't the best thing to do but, there were two partitions when it came to installing xp- this FAT partition (can't remember the size) with no label and a C: partition. I deleted the fat partition and reinstalled xp without a glitch.

Now when i turn the pc on it has two instances of xp (sort of like a dual boot- but with both options being xp home)- if i pick the top one it boots fine, if i pick the second one it says theres a hardware error and asks me to run the dell utilities disk, however booting the dell utilities and drvier disk just gives a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left of the screen and no cd/hd activity after a brief flurry. Now i realise i deleted the factory loaded back up image :(

I guess some how getting back the image is out the question unless i send it back to dell, but i would like to know is whether I can stop getting this dual boot thing at the beginning (its not that big of a problem as when the time counts down it does choose the installed version of xp and boots normally but it is a bit of a pain having that screen)- i mean i can use ghost to make a back up of the system once its working ok again

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[smokafatty]

When you reinstall xp it doesn't format like the old windows used to. I had the same problem before, I just used a win2000 cd to delete & recreate the partition and format it, then took it out and loaded xp. There may be a better way to do it but that worked for me.

[Zac]

You don't need the W2K disk you can choose to format if you boot using the XP disc

[nimbles]

i deleted both the original c: and FAT paritions which i guess had the factory created image, then formatted it as just one C: partition- (had to-when i deleted and then recreated the partition)

So now the image is gone- not sure if thats a big problem, but this dual boot thing is annoying- i'm just wondering if the xp cd that came with the laptop is tailored to have a that image there to work correctly- i don't understand why there is this second xp home boot option- and not sure how i can get rid of it

[geobon]

This can be cured by modifying the boot.ini file. The text below is all that should be in your boot.ini file.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect


To check this firstly you'll have to go into control panel / folder options / view
then tick show hidden files and folders, then untick hide protected operating system files and hit apply.
Now open up my computer and open C: drive, You should now see a file called boot (notepad)
Open it up and see if the contents are as above. If not back it up (right click and send to my documents)
Then just copy and paste the above (only whats above nothing else) and close/save.
Re-start the PC and the dual-boot option should be gone and it should boot as normal. Once done go back into the folder options and undo the changes you made earlier.

[nimbles]

hey thanks geobon!!:luxhello:, it's working now without going to a boot option screen.

Thanks for your help man!
:beer: