double (trouble) boot

Hi,
My PC has 2 HDisks, one has win XP Pro and the other Win 98SE. Got fed up with having to choose OS on boot so I removed Win 98 from one of the HDs however, I still get the message on start up to choose which OS - this seems to want to default to Win 98 so if I don't catch it early enough I'm stuck with the 'Can't find Win.Com message'. Any ideas how I can overcome this irritation?

 

Also, if you prefer to not see the OS selection screen at all, you can set the timeout to 0 seconds. If you do this the boot screen won't be displayed. Don't do it right away though. Leave where it is now or set it to 2 and then once you've set the default to XP, reboot and make sure it defaults to XP. If it does, then you can set the timeout to 0 (zero).

 

double boot

Thanks guys, your suggestion did the trick!

 

It seems to me that the partition table still contains old info. If you have a MSDOS boot disk, boot from it and run FDISK /MBR.

This should tell the system to look only for the right partition...

 

In this situation it's all in the boot.ini. It's booting fine, then finding the boot.ini file as it should, and then the boot.ini is displaying the options that are in it. Remove the one(s) you don't want and all is fine.

 

Don’t run fdisk /mbr. If your XP install does not see itself as the C: drive then you may well kill it as you will be wiping the NT ID Number from the MBR. Because you were dual booting with 98 I would suspect your XP install is D: or later. Any MBR repair on a system where there is an XP install that is not the C: drive should only be done with XP’s own Recovery Console.

The dual boot information is not in the MBR or Partition Table Apeferreira, but in separate files in the root of the active partition on the boot hard drive. Also, fdisk/mbr or fixmbr won’t touch the partition table.

 

Thanks for clarifying McTavish. I suggested that because I had a similar problem a couple of times where the Boot Magic had been corrupted or deleted the improper way and the second primary partition had been wiped out leaving only the first partition active. The main OS was in the drive C: of course, as you pointed out. In both ocurrences, I had no problems...

If this is not the case here, I apologise...

Cheers!

Using FDISK /MBR did a good job and allowed me to bot normally