Reformat & install issue (XP Pro)

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Hi,
I seem to be having an issue with reformatting my harddrive. I won’t go into the details of why I need to reformat, but its preferable.

I followed the normal procedure by booting from CD. Got to the bit where you select your drive for install and reformatted the hardrive into NTFS, then partitioned it into two. Installing XP on the smaller of the 2 partitions.

All fine I thought. However now as I boot up the boot menu is asking me to select from two installations of XP Pro. I cannot understand why as I have reformatted the drive and presumed this would clean the slate for a new install.
Subsequently my computer has now crashed.

Am I missing something here leaving a residual operating system?

I’m running:
Xp Pro SP2
Asus A8N-E mobo
160gb SATA drive
60gb IDE drive
1gb ddram
Athlon 3700+ san diego core

The IDE drive has never had a operating system installed on it as it purely contains personal documents/photographs.

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Could you post the contents of your C:BOOT.INI file?

Note that this file has the Read-only, System and Hidden attribute bits set, so (if you haven’t done this already) you may need to go into Windows Explorer and click on Tools -> Folder Options -> View -> Advanced Settings -> Files and Folders and set the radio button in front of “Show hidden files and folders|” and remove the tick from the box in front of “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)”.

John

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I think I may have resolved this. As soon as I was able to get my system stable enough to keep up and running I enter the boot ini file within Windows. There was a duplicate entry for an operating system which the system recognised as being invalid. I’ve duly deleted it and it now seems to be running okay, although startup and shutdown is incredibly slow (well around the 2 minute mark).
Due to this I think I may do a new reformat and install, to make sure no residue is outstanding (this is me just guessing).

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Have you checked your BIOS to see what your boot device is? If it is set to the IDE drive the XP install process will just add to the boot.ini file on that drive. You could manually edit the file to remove one of the installations.

Joe

--Joe

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I find that blowing away the existing partitions with some form of DOS or a Linux CD first, then booting from the XP CD to find only unallocated space is the way to go.

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