You may be a little unclear about the concepts "OS" (Operating
System) and "Partition".

Windows XP is an operating system. Most people have exactly
one OS on their PC. In the vast majority of all cases it is installed
on drive C:. How many OSs do you think you have on your PC?
Which drive(s) are they installed on?

A partition is a fenced-off area of the hard disk. Most PCs
have a single hard disk with a single partition. Some PCs have
a single hard disk with two partitions: One for the OS, one for
data. How many partitions do you have? Run diskmgmt.msc
from Start / Run to see your own partitioning scheme.

If you are still confused about OSs and partitions on your
hard disk, answer the above questions in your reply.


"RiderDude" <RiderDude@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:211821AD-835D-4949-BEBE-D5C4A8805908@microsoft.com...
> 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
> >
> >
> >