XP Home : how to modify boot menu ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter NumberOne29
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NumberOne29

Hi all,

I just installed XP Home (OEM) on my new system.

I was quite impressed by the ease of installation, and
the fact that it recognized my "boot manager" and
existing partitions, and installed itself in the
"clean" FAT32 partition I pointed it to.

I had a slight problem at the first reboot (corrupted
.dll(?) file in system directory), so I started over and
all went OK the second time.

XP now works, but I have the following boot menu at
startup:

1- Windows XP Home
2- Windows XP Home
3- Unknown operating system (?)

Can I "clean" this menu, that is get rid of choices 2 and 3,
and possibly reduce the timeout for default choice (1)?

PS: I selected FAT32 because I like the idea of being able
to boot from a floppy (for ex. win98 startup disk), and access
the operating system's partition from a command prompt.

Am I right in assuming this is not possible with NTFS?

If I change my mind at some point, is there a way to convert
FAT32 -> NTFS later without loosing data?

Thanks.
 
I'm not sure about the FAT32 -> NTFS conversion so I'll leave that to
others.

RE the boot menu, one can edit boot.ini (in root directory of your C drive)
to look like the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home
Edition" /fastdetect

I'd suggest backing up the original boot.ini file before editing it ;-)

HTH

Rob.
 
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