well thanks for all your replies! i have tried out the 2nd one and it seems to be much faster when it boots up than the 1st one. for the first one it has a horizontal strip that it white and loads when i boot up that one. it takes a minute or so and it is quite frustrating. for the second one it goes to the log in screen straight away. i think i would rather prefer to use the second one. i installed the recovery console cos i had to delete a program. should i remove this? also, what i meant before about 2 hard disk drives in my computer was that one is C:Recovery and the other is D:Local Disk. i think d: is the one i want because it has the amount of hard disk space my computer has, which is 180gb. if i removed one of the boot files would it remove the c: drive too? Here is my boot file: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons Thanks