Phantom Copy of Windows XP

I am in charge of IT at a small non-profit organization. One of the employees is leaving and she asked me to reformat her laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1501) before it was given to someone else. So I popped in the Windows XP pro disc, booted from it, reformatted the hard drive (1 partition), and installed a new copy of windows. It works perfectly and I am currently installing drivers.

Here's the weirdness: when it boots the BIOS gives me a choice of 2 operating systems. Both are identically named "Windows XP Professional Edition" one is the new copy and boots fine. The other gives me a could not read from boot disc error if I try to boot from it.

What is going on?

 

It would appear that the boot sector was not overwritten when you reformatted and the new copy of XP thought the old copy was still there.

This can be resolved very easily, just open up My Computer and choose "Folder options" or similar, from the view menu (I think it is in there, it's been a while since I used XP) and click on the "view" tab. Then uncheck the boxes labelled "Hide hidden file and folders" and "hide protected operating system files (recommended)".

Then in the root of the C:\ drive you should see a file called boot.ini - open this in notepad. It should look something like this: http://i.technet.microsoft.com/Cc700810.depcnf09(en-us,TechNet.10).gif

This is the file that controls the boot up of XP so be careful!

You should see two identical entries like the one shown above, but with "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" and "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)" (without quotes) as the differences between them.

The question at this point is which one of the entries is incorrect? If it is the second one in the list, which I assume it would be, then delete the second entry in the list under [operating systems], and make sure the location behind "default=" is the same as the remaining link.

WARNING: Deleting the wrong entry will lead to XP not booting. This can be fixed by booting from the XP CD and running fixboot.

Save the file and restart the computer to check if the change has worked. If it has, the computer should skip the menu and boot directly into XP, and if it has not worked, it will generate the error you got if you used the boot menu entry for the old XP.

Hope this works for you!

 

That worked perfectly. Thanks a lot collinsl.

I'm still confused as to how I reformatted the entire hard drive but not the boot sector. I mean there was just the single partition.

Thanks again.

 

Actually, thinking back on it, XP might well have copied the original boot.ini and just added it's own startup line to it, which seems logical as this would allow the startup list to allow access to older OSes.

Glad I could help.:major

 

I've seen a lot of this lately, especially with machines that had the XP Media Center Edition as the original...

 

I think you can do the same in Start>Run>msconfig. Under the boot tab choose "Check all boot paths" or similar wording. It will rewrite boot.ini eliminating any invalid paths.

 

Thanks, I will remember that.