Hi, recently I formatted my second partition which had a copy of Vista Ultimate installed on it. Before I was running XP SP3 and Vista SP1 side by side but now I only want to use XP. The problem is, when I load up the computer it still thinks that I have Vista installed even though I deleted the partition and merged the empty space with my primary one. So it gives me the option of starting Vista or XP - not a problem as such but I'd still like to be able to to get rid of the option to load Vista when I don't even have it installed. Are there certain files that need to be deleted/modified? Or is this unavoidable now?

How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP

Please follow all steps in that link

Thanks for the link, however my boot.ini file only has one entry - for XP. It does have a bit that says "/NOEXECUTE = OPTIN " which I didn't see in the example on the Microsoft page - should I delete that?

- I should add that I've got XP Home edition so I can't use the bootcfg.exe utility it suggests.

Start up Windows Xp
Put your Vista DVD in your DVD Drive (and close any autorun)

Start->Run-> e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force (replacing e: with the drive letter of your Vista DVD).
Restart the computer

Remove two files (Boot.BAK & Bootsect.BAK) on XP drive’s root folder (C: ), these were backup files of your previous bootloader, now no longer useful.

Reply back

I couldn't find the "bootsect.bak" file anywhere on my C drive, but I did the other two things you suggested and now the system boots straight into XP. Thanks a lot for the help!

Thanks for the update :grinthumb