computer asking me which OS to boot?

I bought a new 160gig harddrive today and it needed formatting for it to work so i used the windows XP setup CD to format.

NOTE* I installed the new harddrive as slave because i allready had 1 harddrive with winXP on.

SO i though id format the newhardrive with the windows xp cd, install xp then boot to my first harddrive and then i right clicked on the new drive icon and selected "format".

But when i start my computer now it askes me which windows XP installation i want to boot to and they both are exactley the same. If i choose the newhard drive installation it says files missing. It boots ok on to my master hardrive.

Is there a way i can stop it asking me which OS to boot and make it just boot to the master harddrive all the time?

Cheers.

I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do. Did you WANT to load XP on the 160gig new drive? Or just have it blank to use as a 2nd drive? If you just want a blank drive, then format it from your existing Windows. Which it sounds like this is what you did eventually. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Otherwise, the boot menu is handled in the boot.ini file on your primary drive root folder. Usually C:\boot.ini.
To edit the values:
Right-click My Computer - Properties. Go to Advanced tab and click Settings under the 'Startup and Recovery' section. At the top there is a button called "edit". Click that and it will open your boot.ini file, ready to edit.

In order to have just one OS, there should be ONE entry under [operating systems]. Mine looks like this:
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Whichever one you don't want, remove it.
The entry in the [boot loader] section is the "default" entry which it will boot to when the time is reached. Here is my whole file:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


Notice the default entry is the same as the entry below. This is a standard, single OS. It won't pop up the menu even though the timeout is 30 seconds because there is only one OS listed.

Anyway, it isn't as complex as it may sound here. If you don't know which entry is a good one or bad one, then just change the text from "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" like mine says, and change it to like "Test OS 1" and "Test OS 2". Then when you figure out which one is the right one, delete the other one and rename the good one.

That should be enough info to get you going. Good luck!

I think the mistake you made was to install XP on the new hard drive while it is already on the old drive. To format the new, second hard drive, you don't need to insert the cd. You should have gone to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > System Tools. Select the new drive and partition/format it.