removing windows

diggerman123

hi hope you can help

bought a second hand desktop that has 2 versions of windows on it.
on startup it gives me the option of 2 windows xp and asks me to chose.
how do i remove the second version which has some stuff on from the previous owner?

diggerman123

any ideas anyone ?

fwor

A lot depends on how the installations were done. If each was installed on a separate partition, it may be relatively easy.

If they were installed on the same partition, it can be more tricky.

The quickest way to find out is to open the (normally hidden) system file c:/boot.ini with the text editor and paste the contents here. Hopefully someone will then be able to advise further.

Beware - if you get things wrong here, it is quite easy to end up with a system that won't boot!

diggerman123

the problem is i am not at all technically minded.
i would happily wipe everything and start again , is this possible and if so , how ?

plain english answers please !!!!!!!!!!!!

Darksun

diggerman123 wrote: »

the problem is i am not at all technically minded.
i would happily wipe everything and start again , is this possible and if so , how ?

plain english answers please !!!!!!!!!!!!

Was the laptop provided with the Windows XP disc? If so, you can use that to format (erase) the drive and reinstall Windows from scratch

fwor

That depends on several things. Do you have a Windows installation CD? If so, it will be easy.

If not, does the PC have a recovery partition?

But there is a simpler solution: If you don't need to free up the disk space taken up by the unwanted installation, you could simply edit your c:/boot.ini file so that it boots your preferred copy and never offers you the option to boot the unwanted one.

If that is what you want, there is a utility (msconfig) that allows you to do that very simply - if so, say so and someone will go through how to do that.

diggerman123

yes i have the original disc supplied with the pc (it was my father in laws pc from new last year)
i think there was some issue that it had a virus so windows was re installed ? if that makes sense !
so a total wipe would be preferred and start again
how would i do that
i have the pc turned on at the side of my laptop now so i can do it now if someone can talk me through it.
thanks in advance

Darksun

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978307

Follow the instructions for 'Method 1'

diggerman123

Darksun wrote: »

Was the laptop provided with the Windows XP disc? If so, you can use that to format (erase) the drive and reinstall Windows from scratch

thats the way i want darksun , how do i do that ?

Darksun

diggerman123 wrote: »

thats the way i want darksun , how do i do that ?

Follow the instructions in the link I posted above

diggerman123

got to setup bit and it says
-:partition1 (fat) 47mb (39mb free)
c:partition2 (ntfs) 53953mb (45488mb free)
unpartitioned space 8mb
d: partition4 (ntfs) 19054mb (17935mb free)
f:partition3 (fat32) 3224mb (1041mb free)
unpartitioned space 8mb

what do i do from here ?