How do I remove a bogus dual boot up?

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine has a Dell Dimension 3000 and he recently re-installed Windows XP Home from the Dell recovery disk. When he did this, he deleted all the partitions and told the setup program to do the full format of the hard drive. There were a few glitches along the way, like Dell not giving him the correct drivers disk for his model but all that has been sorted out and the machine is back to running fine. The only remaining problem is that every time he boots up, he gets a screen that asks him which version of Windows XP Home he wants to start and it shows “Windows XP Home” listed twice, one above the other. Selecting the top line starts the computer, selecting the bottom line throws an error saying that no such operating system is present and takes you back to the “select which version you want” screen.

I’m not familiar with dual boot setups, but this is like an unintentional dual boot setup. I’m assuming this is coming from the bios but trying to troubleshoot this over the phone isn’t going well. How do I remove this bogus dual boot up? I’ll be going over to his house this weekend and I’d like to have an idea of what I need to do before I get there.

2

It does not come from the BIOS. All the BIOS does is check out a few things to make sure they work, allocate resources for all the PCI stuff, then tries to find an operating system.

I’m guessing you have a bogus entry in your c:\boot.ini file. I know there’s some way to change the boot settings from inside XP’s control panel but they keep moving the damn thing around with every version so I always just edit the boot.ini file directly.

3

Ok here’s what you do:
Go to msconfig, I believe you can do this by going to run, then typing “msconfig”. Select the “BOOT.INI” tab, then click “check all boot paths” it should find that one of them is false and remove it.

4

Thanks guys, worked like a champ! Now he owes me a steak dinner!