here's what i did:
i booted from the XP disks. when it asked me to choose a partition, i
deleted all the partitions that were listed, created a new NTFS partition,
and told it to install XP there. OK, i now understand that it's XP's boot
sequence that thinks there are 2 OSs, and not BIOS. guess i thought it was
BIOS b/c it's in the B&W screen. (after thinking about it for a minute,
though, i realize that's dumb since it goes through the dell bios boot and
then pops out before getting that screen)
in any case, you've now made me concerned that my edit to boot.ini only
makes xp think there's only one OS, but in fact, there really IS another
partition. could that be?
thanks

"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:

> I can't tell what your problem is from the description you've provided, but
> I can assure you that the BIOS doesn't
> "think there are 2 OSs on the disk." The BIOS doesn't know anything about
> operating systems or how many there are, and it's not the BIOS that's asking
> you choose the one to boot from; it's the Windows boot loader.
>
> If the boot loader is giving you a choice of two operating systems, there
> are two lines in boot.ini describing the two choices. So your statement that
> you deleted all partitions, built a new one, and installed Windows on it
> cleanly can't be correct. If you had done that, boot.ini wouldn't reference
> two Windows choices.
>
> --
> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
> Please reply to the newsgroup
>
>
>