help with operating system boot display time, start up repair loop

Almost a year ago, I tried to do an XP and Windows 7 dual boot on my laptop. A few weeks later, I didn't need the XP, so I deleted the partition XP was on. I continued to use 7 though the xp still remained in Windows boot manager upon startup.

A few days ago, in the advanced system settings, I disabled the bootable OS display, and set my default OS to Windows 7. I restarted and now I'm stuck in a continuous startup repair loop, where it tells me that it can't fix my problem automatically and that the cause is an "OS version mismatch". Could it be trying to boot the partition XP was on? I can't log on my computer at all.

In the command prompt that comes up after I go to the system recovery options screen, I tried to fix the boot options using bootrec / commands, but so far none of them have worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

You may need to make sure Win7 partition is marked Active first using DISKPART commands from the Repair CD: Partition - Mark as Active

Then boot back into the Win7 Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots as shown in tutorial linked by BareFootKid.

If you want to have a Graphical representation of what you are doing, use free Partition Wizard bootable CD. You can also use it to delete XP partition, resize Win7 into the deleted space, mark Win7 Active, etc. Barefoot wrote an excellent tutorial on its use here: Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

Thanks guys. Since my optical drive hardware is shot, I really had a ton of help from that USB System Repair disk tutorial. :] I tried to repair my laptop with startup repair, but it kept giving me the "OS incompatible with startup repair" error, so after a couple of days, I gave up and just did a clean install and restored some of my files with windows.old.

I did notice that after I did a clean install, in bcdedit "Windows Legacy OS Loader" was there when it hadn't been there before. Needless to say, I won't be tinkering around with boot options anymore Thanks again.