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[Help] Dual Boot Vista / XP Problem


morocco31477

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OK this is the deal. I have a C: HD with one big partition with XP Pro that I've always used. I recently got a 120GB HD and broke it up into three partitions. On one of those I installed XP again and currently using it as my primary OS (D: ). On E: I installed Vista. When I reboot first I get a dual boot screen for either Vista or Legacy (XP) OS, after that I get another boot screen for which XP Pro to boot into. I reformated the Vista partition cause I no longer wanted it. I still get the Vista / Legacy dual boot screen. I DO NOT want this, I want it to go away. I deleted that entry out of my boot.ini but it's not working, I still get the screen. Can someone please help me.

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Hi,

I'm a little confused as to what disk has the active primary partition on it - anyhow I believe your problem is that the NTFS bootloader has been referenced via the MBR of the active primary partition. To remove the OS choice screen you'll need to "reset" the MBR. Now, I'm not sure what the best move is for you from this point forward.

** Don't try anything until you are sure you know what you are doing as it could make your system unbootable! **

It could be something as simple as using a DOS boot disk and typing FDISK /MBR. It could also be a case of using the recovery console and FIXMBR. I really don't know as I've never had to do it myself.

I would do a little research on these options.

Good luck,

Andy

Edited by Fencer128
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This was a really strange problem. What happend was Vista has a different boot loader then NT/XP. So it created a \boot folder and a bootsect file on my C: drive. What I did was deleted that boot folder and the file, as well as my boot.ini folder. That fixed the Vista dual boot screen during boot up. Now it's back to normal, the only dual boot screen that shows up is for my XP partition on my C: drive and XP partition on my D: drive. The only problem now is that under those two choices I have an option for "Windows (default)" which will automatically boot into my C:, but from this point forward I want to boot into my D:. But it's just a matter of hitting the up arrow twice and hitting enter so I don't mind. Just glad I got that Vista screen out of the way.

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You already found out the reason, but FYI there is a better approach to fixing this.

Vista changes the boot sector on the active partition to a new format which does not use the BOOT.INI file at all.

The \BOOT folder is created and contains a few tools for modifying the boot sequence.

One of these tools is FIXNTFS.

FIXNTFS -xp changes the boot sector to the classic "XP" style, using BOOT.INI to describe the boot options.

FIXNTFS -lh changes it to the new "Longhorn" style, where the boot menu options are edited using another tool called BCDEDIT.

What you should have done after (or even before) removing Vista is to run FIXNTFS -xp, then edit BOOT.INI to remove the entry for the Vista partition and amend the default boot option.

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