I managed to get two copies of WinXP installed on a laptop, and I’d really like to get rid of one so that the machine boots directly into my preferred copy. Can anyone walk me through what is involved in this process?
Go to the start menu and select “Run”, then type “msconfig” in the box. Hit enter.
You’ll get the configuration dialog, and you can click on the “boot.ini” tab. Once there, click the “Check all boot paths” button. It will likely tell you that one of the boot paths isn’t there, and would you like to remove it. Say yes, and reboot the computer.
If you’ve managed to install XP to 2 distinct partitions, you may want to delete the superfluous install files. If it’s just a duplicate boot path, than the above will work perfect.
Would I be correct in guessing that before I do any of the above, I need to use explorer.exe to actually delete not just the install files but the whole windows directory?
No – in fact i strongly advise against it. Never throw away a possible Plan B until needed! The other installed OS won’t hurt anything. You can delete it after you get the desired results, but if you’ve been using that other install I’d wait a while, because there’s always some data (settings, cookies, bookmarks) that I want to retrieve from the other install. (I’m assuming that they are installed on different drives. If not, deleting could cause problems if one OS got confused)
I’m also assuming that you want to nuke the other one anyway. If you just want to boot to a different install by default, simply edit the default= line to point at the other OS install (copy the proper values from the appropriate line below [Operating Systems]). You’ll probab;ly want to set timeout= to something less than 30
If you haven’t really done anything to it yet like install programs or personal files (basically you have 2 clean windows installs), than just start over, reformat and do it correctly. Will probably make things better in the long run. If you’ve already got a bunch of stuff on there, don’t worry about it.