change startup XP

I am not familair with XP.
reinstalled XP on a friend's system after a fatal virus hit.
when the system starts (before XP) it offers a startup text screen with two windows options . the wcreen counts down itself and if you don't hit the enter key will start with option 1 in 26 seconds.
its a Dell computer with OEM XP.
any ideas on how to remove this screen ?

 

Hello schamish,

What you are seeing is a dual boot menu. Was there another OS running?

If not, There are two versions of XP running.

Did you install XP over itself? Or clean onto another partition?

I think you are running two versions, one of them still has the virus infection.

I think the best course of action is to sart over with wiping disk with fdisk first.

Wait for more replies of course.

Regards - Charles

 

it was a clean instal on a drive that was recormatted.
thanks

 

Maybe I'm making the wrong assumption here - describe the options please.

I'm dual booting and I get a choice of which OS to boot into with XP being the default if not overridden, complete with countdown.

Regards - Charles

 

That can happen if the recovery console was loaded. You get an option to boot to it. Useful in case things go way bad for you.

My suggestion is to keep that option (if it is the recovery console) but maybe shorten the selection time to 3-4 seconds which is long enough.

Just to make sure, post the contents of his c:\boot.ini file here. Small text file of maybe 8 lines. It will be hidden and read-only but if you do
start~run~notepad c:\boot.ini
it should open you can copy the contents.