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#1
Windows Boot Manager issue - accidentally installed 2 OS's
First - I'm no computer whiz, which is why I am posting here - hoping you gurus can guide me through a fix via 'baby-steps.'
Ok... I put a new hard drive in a Dell Precision Workstation 390. It apparently had some sort of Raid ADHD (probably have those initials messed up... but it kind of describes the way I'm feeling )
It has two hard drives.
The new hard drive is the OS/Boot drive. It was a 1tb drive, so I thought I might experiment and partition it down into two smaller drives - thinking that the bootable portion might boot faster if the drive was smaller, plus - thinking the other drive could act as an additional storage drive that wouldn't bog down the Boot Drive Partition. Is that thinking flawed?
Anyway... I tried putting XP back on and I kept getting this error saying that 'Cannot find a drive'..... something to that effect.
So, I got into the Bios... and changed the type of Raid to a different one... and eventually it seemed that it might work... XP installed, but everything was jack-screwed in that the video drivers weren't there, etc, etc.
So, I thought, I'm going to stick in my Windows 7 upgrade (which I was saving for another computer) and see if I can just boot off that disk, wipe off the other OS and maybe the newer Windows 7 would work.
Well.... it DID work!
Only problem is, I discovered that now I get the Windows Boot Manager everytime I boot the computer and it wants me to decide between "Windows 7 or a Previous Installation." I select 'Windows 7' and it boots just fine... but this doesn't seem right to me and I want to get rid of the Boot Manager and just have Windows 7 boot up.
I dug around a bit and discovered I SOMEHOW (slap to the forehead) installed Windows XP onto the 2nd partitioned portion of my new drive.
I went to that drive letter and 'deleted' the 'windows' folder.
But I still get the Windows Boot Manager popping up upon startup.
Can you tell me, in very detailed steps an ignorant person like me can understand, how to get this fixed?
I also see in my Bios Settup 'BOOT SEQUENCE' that both my hard drives are listed under the CD Rom drive as 'Add-in Hard Drive' ........and then to the right of each of those it says, [Not present].
What does that mean????
The computer seems to boot and run fine, but shouldn't the drives be listed by the Drive Manufacturer's name and capacity???
Thanks for your help.