OK. I did some upgrading on my PC, and I think I made a mistake. I put my existing hard drive into a new machine. When I tried booting it up, I got errors, saying that it wasn’t bootable. I put in my Windows 2000 CD, and booted from the CD. Repairing didn’t seem to help, so I tried installing Windows fresh, without removing the old version. That worked, and I can boot fine now.
Now, I have two different (though identical) versions of Windows on my machine. It wouldn’t let me uninstall the old one. I deleted the entire WINNT directory, and it still gives me the option to boot with either one at startup. How can I convince my machine that there’s only one copy of Windows?
There’s a read-only file in your root directory (usually c:\ ) called boot.ini - Windows uses it to display the boot menu. Delete the line for the non-existent Windows installation.
I’d bet that you see two options because both are in your boot.ini file (it’s a hidden, system file on the C: drive). Here is a MS KB article detailing what it looks like and how to modify it. The article specifies XP, but it’s the same for W2K.
Taking a guess, I’d say that the errors you saw saying it wasn’t bootable was a BSOD that said “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE”. Although you’ve fixed that problem, FWIW, that message can sometimes be remedied by allowing the system to boot from the CD and going through the following procedure.
Are you running two instances of “Explorer.exe”? Because I am, on XP (I have no idea how or why this happened). The thing is, I can’t tell which one is the “real” one, so I can’t follow instructiions on how to eliminate it. If you’re runnning two "Explorer.exe"s, maybe we can figure this out together.