Right, well after much trouble-shooting, I've just replaced my motherboard. Unfortunatley I had to reinstall Windows, so did that on a new SATA 250GB HD, and plugged my old one in with the intention of using it as a backup drive. They are configured in a slave and master format.

However, when booting up now, I get the dos type screen with the choice of XP Pro or home, with a 30 second count down timer after which it defaults to booting Pro. Whilst pressing enter doesn't take many micro seconds, it gets on my tits. I've never had Home on my system, and when I select that instead it gives me an error message and restarts.

Whats the problem? How do I turn this "feature" off, how did it get there etc?

TIA!

Have you left the xp cd in the drive?

Have you left the xp cd in the drive?

No. When I do that it gives me the option of "press any key to boot from CD".

Ah thats right.

In that case go into your system properties (Windows Key + Break)

Go to the advanced tab.. Startup and recovery

All will become clear

Hello !

This does sometimes happen, and is usually fairly easy to sort out.

Boot into XP

Right click on My Computer and select properties

Select the "Advanced" Tab

In the section marked Startup and recovery click settings

Ensure that your preferred windows is selected as the default, then uncheck "time to display list of operating systems"

Click OK !

If you want to double check that the default operating system is correct, before unchecking the time to display.... reduce the time from 30 seconds to 5 seconds.

You have to reboot for the change to fully apply !

Cheers

Rich

Ah thats right.

In that case go into your system properties (Windows Key + Break)

Go to the advanced tab.. Startup and recovery

All will become clear

Ta. WIll give it a go when I get home!

All done, thanks Leon and ****

And for future reference you can just edit the boot.ini file in notepad

And for future reference you can just edit the boot.ini file in notepad

...?

So why did Home ever appear? It wont boot it because it doesnt exist, I've never had a Home install!

Tom, sorry to be picky, but if you're using SATA, there's no such thing as "master" or "slave" which you do get with PATA :P

The options you've changed in the advanced settings is the boot.ini file. You won't however see it in explorer if you don't untick the "Hide protected operating system files" in the View menu under Tools - Options

Tom, sorry to be picky, but if you're using SATA, there's no such thing as "master" or "slave" which you do get with PATA :P

The options you've changed in the advanced settings is the boot.ini file. You won't however see it in explorer if you don't untick the "Hide protected operating system files" in the View menu under Tools - Options

I know this, but my ASUS motherboard manual talks about SATA sockets SATA1 and SATA2 (red) are master, and SATA3 and SATA4 (black) being slave. :confused:

Nope SATA is a point to point protocol, there really is no master or slave, just asus being silly in the bios.

THe reason the other XP appeared is because you had your old HDD plugged in when you reinstalled the system, and the windows installer found it and added a line to boot.ini to allow you to boot into it should yopu desire.

HTH

Nope SATA is a point to point protocol, there really is no master or slave, just asus being silly in the bios.

THe reason the other XP appeared is because you had your old HDD plugged in when you reinstalled the system, and the windows installer found it and added a line to boot.ini to allow you to boot into it should yopu desire.

HTH

But the old HD was only ever Pro too... although that would make sense otherwise.

Oh in that case the windows installer is just stupid :P

Oh in that case the windows installer is just stupid :P

That sounds more like it! :rofl:

The windows installer wouldnt have known what version so it just picks home. It sees an XP install, but because the files are basically they same it cant work it out.

There should be something to identifty it, or it should just call it XP, when i installed one on a system with an existing XP Pro it called it XP Pro :S

Just use grub :P