I hope that I explain this right. A few days ago, my computer crashed. Since I was planning on doing some sort of system wipe in the near future, I decided that this would be a good oportunity. So I made a back-up of all my info, got my XP install disc, reformated my hard drive, and reinstalled XP. And something weird happened. Every time I boot up the computer, I get a black screen much like the grub screen I would get when my computer was dual booted. It asks me which OS I want to boot to, and gives me three identicle options for XP Professional. Why is this, what are they, and how do I get rid of them?
Before you ask, I have my system restor turned off, and supposedly that deleted any restor points. That was my first thought.
PS. I'm sorry about the horrid spelling, this computer doesn't support spell check…
Right click My Computer, click Properties. Click the Advanced tab. Click the Settings button under startup and recovery. Click EDIT to edit the startup options file manually.
Boot.ini will load in Notepad. Identify and remove the two erroneous entries listed. They will be listed in the same order as the menu when you try to boot your computer. Save the changes.
Now when you boot those extra options will be gone.
EDIT: You asked what they are and why. This is what the Windows setup program does to try to assist you in dual-booting your system. It recognized your existing operating system installation, and when you deleted it and went right into re-installing it tried to preserve the previous operating system entry in your boot.ini file not realizing that you just deleted that installation. I would consider this a bug in the windows xp setup routine.
If you did a clean install, that included formatting the hard drive, you should not see the boot selection screen you are seeing.
Did you truly do a Clean Install or did you do a Parallel install, along side of the existing copy of XP?. If the latter, then you have multiple copies of XP on your computer taking up a lot of disk space.
Do you see more than one C:\Windows directory, perhaps a Windows.000 or a Windows.001?
Actually, Windows does this on a regular basis. It is caused from deleting the old partitions that had an installation but not restarting the setup process before reinstalling the new. Therefore, Windows "remembers" the previous installation during the setup process (it scans for old installations before you move forward) and builds the boot.ini file in such a way to preserve the "other installation," that has just been deleted. I think the problem really occurs in instances where the operating system is reinstalled on a different partition than the original was. For example, if the computer had a recovery console installed and that partition along with the current windows installation partition was deleted, and a new, single partition was created, the new partition would be a different partition number than the other installation of windows was because now the recovery console partition is gone.
I see it all the time during a "fresh" install. Its a bug in Windows setup. It should be smarter than that.
Thanks again!
