Reinstall Of Xp

[stallinggrunt]

Ok, I have a friend who runs a small business here in town. He ask me to check his PC and see if his XP install is valid. Seems he let some kid from his church work on it. It has XP pro that works and looks to be valid to me, it updates and everything looks legit. Seems the kid however put the Xp Pro in along with the OEM XP home. Rather than deleting the OEM version, he partitioned and formated it so that now both show up. So now when he boots up it ask which version he wants to run. Of course the Home version errors out and does not work at all, the Pro version works fine.

 

He ask me if I could just reinstall the OEM version from the recovery disk and drop the Pro version off the PC. The Pc is a Compaq. The PC will not let me into the bios to change the boot order. And I'm not sure if the recovery disc would be able to delete the partitions and reinstall fresh if I could get into Bios anyway.

 

Is there hope in getting his PC back to its original state? Why can I not get into BIOS? If it were me I'd run the XP Pro and forget the OEM version. I think when it boots up and ask him to choose which operating system he wants is what bugs him.

 

Thanks...........

[Archerzz]

Friend has a similar problem but since this is on one drive that is partitioned his main problem wont be an issue. If you could talk him into keeping Pro you could just reformat the other partition and use it as storage space.

[suburban36]

There is a roll back function on XP which will allow you to go back to a specific date prior to the install. Please back all important data in case it crashes your system but I have used it and it works.

[wiewior1984]

I guess there may bo no need in rollback.

Try turning on the hidden system files in windows and look for C:\boot.ini file

It is Hidden + System + ReadOnly file. It holds info about where to start loading OS from. Just strip it of its privileges and edit it with notepad. Then delete the whole entry that corresponds to nonlegit OS, save and reapply attributes.

 

You can strip attributes by typing

ATTRIB -R-S-H C:\boot.ini in command prompt;

and then add them back with ATTRIB +R+S+H C:\boot.ini

 

Repost and write how it went

[m1a20]

I guess there may bo no need in rollback.

Try turning on the hidden system files in windows and look for C:\boot.ini file

It is Hidden + System + ReadOnly file. It holds info about where to start loading OS from. Just strip it of its privileges and edit it with notepad. Then delete the whole entry that corresponds to nonlegit OS, save and reapply attributes.

 

You can strip attributes by typing

ATTRIB -R-S-H C:\boot.ini in command prompt;

and then add them back with ATTRIB +R+S+H C:\boot.ini

 

Repost and write how it went

 

glad you figured that out. removing the boot option should keep it from bothering him to choose which os to load. good plan. you still have the old os partition. if you don't need anything from it, you can format it as was previously suggested and use for more storage.

 

-m

[m1a20]

also for the compaq bios does it prompt for an F-key or nothing at all? if nothing is prompting you might try holding the ESC key while the system boots to get a keyboard error to force the setup prompt or perhaps it is F2, F10, or DEL to get to the bios.

[stallinggrunt]

wiewior1984, I used what you suggested and I can now boot from CD. I have installed a fresh copy of XP for him. In cmd prmp I really could not tell if ATTRIB -R-S-H C:\boot.ini was doing anything. But it did let me boot from a CD. As before though I still can not get into Bios. Which is fine he just wanted a fresh copy of XP installed.

 

And yes I did try all the "F" keys and delete, same as before. But like I said this time it would boot from CD. Personally I don't think I would have invested in another copy of XP as he did, the recovery disc said it was the wrong machine. Its an older Compaq, with AMD Athlon XP 2000+ and a gig of DDR ram, running all the onboard goodies. But I guess if he can use it in his business thats ok.

 

Thanks for the replys everyone.