boot.ini

I am not sure that it is called boot.ini file in Win 7, but here goes. I had to clean install Win 7 again because I crashed it on the same HDD I was using before. When I did that, I deleted all the partitions and then created them again to try to eliminated problems such as the one I have.

On startup I get a window with two Window 7's listed and it has me pick which one i want for startup. I always pick the top one, but I'm not even sure that matters.

I did a search on C drive (the OS drive) for boot.ini with show system files and folders turned on. Zip, nada absolutely nothing.

I ran "msconfig" then opened the Boot tab. There are two Windows 7 listed there. The top one says Default but other than that they are the same. Before I do anything I would like to make a copy of the "boot.ini before deleting anything.

How do I get rid of the one file that is causing this??

Thank you

Sorry about the clarity of the question.

Win XP has never been installed on the pc. I built this machine strictly for Win 7.

You are correct in that what comes up on the screen looks exactly like it would have in Win XP.

First on start up:
1. I get a screen that lists two Windows 7 and I have to select one of these then click Enter for Windows to continue to boot.

2. When I run msconfig there are two Win 7 files indicated as below:



It looks almost identical to what Win XP would have looked like with two boot.ini files.

Hope that clears up the question and we can get a solution to the problem.

Thanks

BCDedit looks great, but it is more complicated than I would like to get into at the moment. I will give it further study shortly.

This brought up two or three other thoughts.

1. Why can't the second line of msconfig be deleted. It has that option. The first line does not have the option to delete.





2. Why does the double entry occur and how can it be prevented. I even resized the partitions before installing and definitely formatted the Cdrive??

Thanks

Please provide a screenshot of diskmgmt.msc with all volumes clearly shown and all text legible.

The questions you are asking cannot be addressed without benefit of the information contained there.

There is a program called easyBCD.

You can use it to edit the startup sequence.

(Boot.ini only applies to XP, not to Vista, nor to Win7.)

When using easyBCD, make sure you don't delete right away.
First rename one of the startups so it's distinguishable from the other, and reboot and see which one works.

When you found out which one works, you can safely delete the other entry.

Good luck.

Greetz

Here is the screen shot of disk management:

huffman said:

Here is the screen shot of disk management:

Your active partition is 100mb reserved by Win7 during install.
That means the boot files are on that partition.

Is your W7 installation on C: ?

You said during boot you get two "Windows 7...." lines to chose from.

Did you do what I suggested? use easybcd and rename one of the startup names to be able to distinguish which is which?

Once you know which of the two is obsolete, you can use easybcd again to delete that entry.

Good luck

(while you are at it, in easybcd you can check the "nr. of processors" box and select the amount of cores you have.
That will make your pc boot a lot faster.)

Yes Windows 7 is instaled on C drive.

Here is what easyBCD looked like:



The top item should be the default one and the bottom one will run you in circles if it is chosen to boot with.

I saw no way to rename the files at all and if the wrong one is deleted, Windows can not be opened.