Remove windows installation from bootloader

Ok, my father has managed to get himself into a setup where he has windows installed, but upon booting, it also shows a windows install option. How would he go about removing the option to have to chose from installing windows or going into windows?

You'll need to manually edit the Boot.ini file. When you have the option of booting to an "Unidentified OS", or any other OS/multiple instances of the same OS (in the boot menu) and you want to remove one or more of them...

System Properties | "Advanced" tab | "Startup and Recovery" ("Settings" button) | "Edit" button. The Boot.ini looks like this when XP is the only available boot option...

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) | WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) | WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home (or Professional) Edition" /fastdetect

...I used the "Pipe"(|) character in the "boot loader" menu above instead of the "slash"(\) character so it would be properly formatted.

When you see "Unidentified OS" or a second instance of the same OS/any other OS as a boot menu option, you'll need to delete the last line in the Boot.ini that starts with..."C:\Unidentified operating system on drive C." (or whatever happens to be the second OS choice in your particular case), save the file and reboot.

Yea, that was the first thing I told him. Its not in there. This isnt a second windows entry, its an actual windows install entry.

I don't follow you... what do you mean "an actual windows install entry"?

Ok, basically he has it like this:

Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Installation

We need to remove the Installation entry, because I guess he tried to do an install and went partially through, then started over or something, but he has his windows installed verison, then a windows install that has not completed

Midnight Dream said:

We need to remove the Installation entry

Click to expand...

My post about editing the Boot.ini will accomplish what you want to do... remove the "Windows XP Installation" entry from the OS selection screen, and boot directly into the XP Pro install.

redduc900 said:

My post about editing the Boot.ini will accomplish what you want to do... remove the "Windows XP Installation" entry from the OS selection screen, and boot directly into the XP Pro install.

Click to expand...

lol, no it wont. Like I said, that was the first thing I had him check. There is only the windows XP pro finished install in there. The actual incomplete entry is not there.

Copy the contents of the Boot.ini and paste it into this thread.

redduc900 said:

Copy the contents of the Boot.ini and paste it into this thread.

Click to expand...

I will have to do that when I go over to his house tommorow (currently live on my own, so I was doing tech support over the phone)

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Click to expand...

See? Clean and normal. Like I stated, its not in there, and that was the first thing I directed him towards. In my 5 years of repairing computers, i've never had to do something like this.

Try booting to recovery console, and doing a bootcfg /rebuild. It should ask you which installations to add to the boot order.

Will call and tell him after I get out of school and off work. Thanks.