nonexistant OS trying to boot

[foozy]

So I formatted a 250gig drive with an sp0 version of XP Pro, naturally it only recognized ~130gigs. I got around that problem by formatting the remaining space with an sp2 version of xp home, then booting up the pro partition and formatting the home partition from within windows.

The problem is that during startup the computer still sees two operating systems - XP home and XP pro. If you don't select XP pro in ~2 seconds, it tries to boot xp home and fails because the operating system doesn't actually exist.

I tried messing around with the bios, even reset the CMOS with the jumper. Theres data on the partitions so I didn't want to reformat anything.

Any suggestions?

 

[Metallix6403]

Do you have a spare hard drive layin around, cause if you can find even a small hard drive you can set that to be the master and install XP Pro on it leaving your 250 gig as the slave. Just boot from the master and that should prevent XP Home from trying to load. After updating Pro to SP2 you would have the ability to format the entire 250 gig drive.

Of course, that just ignores the fact that you dont want to reformat.

Im not sure of any method to to fix the problem using one HD with out reformating since XP Home probably placed its own files on both partions so it could recognize both partions once Windows was running.

Another suggestion, again if you are willing to format, just format the entire drive with your XP Home SP2 and try upgrading to Pro from a stable system. Might work but then again it might not....Sorry for not being much help...

Good luck though!

 

[foozy]

yeah its not on my computer, it's gotta be a software solution, i'm wondering if I can reinstall winxp pro on the main partition? think that would kill anything left over from the xp home install?

 

[N3051M]

start >run and type msconfig
Go to the Boot tab and delete the entry of the OS you don't want to keep or select "check all boot paths" button

 

[foozy]

sweet, thank you, I hope that'll work