Somethings up with the boot

Hi my mom has a pretty decent computer, dual core 2.0ghz amd 64 processor, 1gb 400 ddr ram, one 350gb harddrive which is broken into 2 partitions. one partition is a recovery partition and one is windows media center. And an nvidia 6200 le I believe. Now the problem is that every time she boots she gets an option to choose an operating system which I find very odd since she only runs one operating system. I checked her bios and everything is a ok so far that I can tell. It boots up and you get a choice of windows media center or windows recovery console. I think this is letting her choose between her recovery partition and her normal partition. Now this just randomly happened so I can't pin point the location of the problem, but is there someway to atleast give it less time to choose the parts. It gives her 30 seconds to choose an operating system, so is there a way to maybe make it 0 as in disabled or 1 second or something. This is not a computer life threatening issue it is just a small task that shouldn't be to difficult for all you experts hopefully I myself one day will become as knowledgable as the staff here at Tom Coyote as I have applied for the 'Classroom'. Wish me luck lol . All thanks to you. François

Hi Bargers, Any chance your Mom's machine has a "boot manager" installed. It would be listed in Add/Remove (don't remove it if its there, unless you know the original reason for having it) Some third-party partitioning software have built-in boot managers that allow for the machine to be booted from various partitions. For instance for a dual-boot, XP - Vista, or XP - Win98, or XP -Linux. I realize you've stated that your Mom has XP and a restore partition, so the "dual-boot" issues are just included above for illustration. Of the partitioning softwares, an example might be Partition Magic. If it is installed, it can always allow the user to select which partition to boot from, and may present the choices even if no additional partitions have been created.

Okay well I do not believe there is one installed, although I have read before that there is a way to set the delay for choosing an operating system so I believe if I can find that somewhere I can disable it for her. Anyways Thanks for all the help. Francois

Right click on My Computer icon > Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > System Startup > Uncheck: Time to display list of Operating Systems and Click Ok. This will enable you to hide OS choice menu

Okay I'm just going to bed, but I will do this and post the results tomorrow. Have a good night dough, Thanks for all the help Francois

Yup It worked perfectly Thank you. Francois