[Fighting For Spring]

Hey, so I went out and bought an external DVD drive today and decided to reinstall XP home on my mini using the cd dell supplied. I must have done something wrong as there are now two windows XP Home boot options to choose from at startup. Choosing the second option just took me straight back to my old desktop and documents while the first option is clearly the new XP install. There were also duplicate WINDOWS folders in the C directory, I worked out which one the new xp install was using and attempted to remove the other one, I managed to remove the majority of the files but an error window appears saying access is denied and so what is left of the folder remains, and the second boot option is still there.

What can I do to remove the original XP install and its files? Or do I need to wipe the HDD and start again?
Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

[yakinikku]

is your system drive showing the proper amount of total space?

also, kinda unrelated question but does your boot screen (the one that says "windows XP" with the scrolling blue bar) come into frame really slow?

[Fighting For Spring]

Yes it is showing 14.3GB with about 5GB being used up, there is only a C drive no D or E drives.

The windows logo fades in at normal speed.

Also i'm not sure if this is important but i never deleted the WINDOWS folder, just cut and paste its contents to an external HDD. and now when i select the second option it is no longer able to boot it. a message appears saying a file is missing or corrupt. is there something i can do to just remove the second option from the boot screen and then delete the remaining files?

[WolfKeeper]

The boot options are in the boot.ini file in the root of the drive (it's hidden.) You can also edit it from My Computer > Properties ... Advanced tab, then the Settings button under Startup and Recovery.

You might not be able to delete the old directory if it was NTFS, the rights on the folders might be jacked up. You'd need to reclaim ownership first.

[cookiemonster]

If you have backups of all your important documents, the easiest way to clean all this up is to reinstall Windows, making sure to delete the necessary partitions and reformat, giving you a clean install, rather than installing over a previous installation. Editing the boot.ini file will remove the option to boot from the old Windows installation, but you'd still have tons of files taking up space unnecessarily.

[Fighting For Spring]

hey, just thought i'd let you know i reinstalled XP again and everything works fine! thanks again.