I recently added an SATA drive to my system and installed XP-SP2 on it. The drive is supported from the mb rather than an addon card. I want it to be my primary boot drive due to the increased speed. I now have a dual boot system with the original XP installation residing on drive C:.

My question: Is it possible to remove the dual boot from boot.ini and remove the XP on drive C:? I'm assuming that I can't FORMAT the drive AFTERWARD because boot.ini lives on C. If this is true, how much of the old installation can I remove.

My bios is set to ALLOW the os to determine boot priorities and it APPEARS that I can't select the SATA as the 1st boot drive.

Thanks.You can edit boot.ini to only have one option, (the XP installed on the SATA drive) following which no menu will be presented, and the system will boot to that XP installation every time. Following that, I believe you can delete everything from the C: drive just leaving NTLDR, ntdetect.com and boot.ini in place in the root folder.

Perhaps it might be as well to do the deletion in stages, moving the files elsewhere first rather than simply deleting them straight away, so that you can correct any mistakes.




Quote from: contrex on October 08, 2007, 12:46:42 PM

You can edit boot.ini to only have one option, (the XP installed on the SATA drive) following which no menu will be presented, and the system will boot to that XP installation every time. Following that, I believe you can delete everything from the C: drive just leaving NTLDR, ntdetect.com and boot.ini in place in the root folder.

Perhaps it might be as well to do the deletion in stages, moving the files elsewhere first rather than simply deleting them straight away, so that you can correct any mistakes.