Windows Advice needed

the_mrs_2

I have Windows XP Home installed on my PC,Last year I had a problem with the computer,virus etc.It was taken away and fixed.When I started it up it had Windows Professional on it,the Guy returned and re-loaded my XP Home back on it but he also left the other one still installed,now although it has never given me any problems since then I was wondering if I could delete this,is it easy to do,or would I be deleting the both of them.Not being technically minded I am a bit worried in case I cause any problems to the PC.I know I should have sorted this when it happened but got caught up with other things.Any help would be appreciated.

robmar0se

Kind of difficult to answer with the info given.

Can you answer one question and then report on alook up on uoir hard drive.

1. When you start/boot, do get an option.menu to select XP Home and XP Pro?

2. Can you go to start/control panel/ Admin Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management: there you should see what partitions you gave on your C drive - could you then tell us how it is organised please?

closed

post the contents of c:\boot.ini (might be a hidden file)

the_mrs_2

Thanks for your reply,yes when I start it up I do get the option to select either of them.I have followed your request for question 2 and it says the following.
Volume (C)
Layout-Partition
Type-Basic
File System-NTFS
Status-Healthy (System)
Capacity-74.52GB
Free Space-42.01GB
%Free-56%
Fault Tolerance-No
Overhead-0%

Dont know if any of this is helpful,as I said in my original post I am not Technically minded at all,so sorry to be a pain,but very grateful for any advice.It doesnt seem to be causing me any problems having them both on the computer its just that I think that as I dont use the Professional one at all it seems silly to keep it.Thanks for your time though.

robmar0se

Re part 2, in the disk management part, you should see other partitions - if you look below there is a schemaric showing disk 0 split first into a number of parts incuding "C" - sorry I should have asked what was also within disk 0 - probably a second partition which might be D or E possably? Any others within the disk 0?

I am assuming ere that there are two partitons, but there may be more, as sometimes the data maybe held seperately in another partition so that both Home & Pro may access it.

We need to confirm that Home is C, and then which partition is Pro - you may be able to tell from looking at the partition/logical disks on My Computer. We will at some point delete this partiton but not now,

Next as "Closed" said in his post we need to access the Boot.ini file, which will be in the C drive - you may not be able to see it right away. To see it, open My computer, then the C drive, and then at the top click on Tools, then Folder Options, then View. We now need to change 3 options; first click on Show Hidden Files & Folders, then click on Hide Extensions for Known File Types, so that the tick in the box is removed, then ditto on Hide Protected Operating System Files (recommended) - tick also removed. Click Apply and OK.

If you now see the Boot.ini file - a lot of care is needed here
Right click on the Boot.ini file, then from the drop down menu, select "open with" and choose Wordpad. Copy and paste the wordpad list into yr reply to this post. Close Wordpad, if it asks you to save it - say NO! we don't want to change anything at this juncture

here is what your boot.ini file may look like:

This shows a boot.ini file for a dual boot PC with Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional
installed in two different partitions on the same hard drive (i.e. the first hard drive on primary IDE).
NOTE: The default OS is Windows XP Home
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Home" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

At this point I would suggest that you (i) tell us how your hard drive is organised, and secondly copy/past a copy of your Boot.ini file in your reply (for example yr default maybe Pro).

Once we have worked out what partitons you have and the sequence we can work out what to delete.

Best to ask questions if not clear...........