Win XP laptop rebuild - what went wrong?

Morning forum goers

Could I ask your advice ? I had a virus on my laptop which resulted in me having to reinstall the OS this week, somewhere along the line I have dropped a bollock though. After I loaded XP and re-booted the machine I get a black screen asking me which OS I wanted to load !?!? It gives me 2 options - No.1 empty & No.2 Windows XP highlight your choice to start. Whats gone wrong . what have I done ? I only have 1 real choice, why does it ask me to maybe choose another that isn't there ?

Many TIA for any replies

Regards

Andy

did you format all the partitions before you reinstalled?

Yeah Soul, when doing the install the information showed 1 formatted unpartitioned space of approx 40gig

any ideas ?

Sounds like just a rogue entry in your boot.ini file. easy to fix.
Make a note of the good entry on the list when you boot up, boot into windows
right click on my computer and choose properties
Goto the advanced tab and click on the button next to 'startup and recovery'
at the top you will see a system startup section, change the dropdown on the defaul operating system to the entry you made a note of earlier (its very important you pick the right one), then uncheck the box next to 'time to display list of operating systems'
click ok
restart windows, it should load straight away instead of giving you the list

I think you might have formatted the partitions, but not the drive? This would mean that it would find the Master Boot Record still, but then not be able to find the information in the partition about the OS. Which I am guessing has lead to the blank entry.

I haven't reinstalled an XP OS for years, so I could be talking crap. But I would say... format the whole drive and not just delete a partition.

Wow, thanks for the help so far guys, I'll try those suggestions when I get back in from work and post back to let you know how it goes.

Thanks again

[SIZE=2]Sounds like the boot.ini has a few gremlins. Edit it and replace whatever is in there with:

[/SIZE][FONT=Times New Roman][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="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
[/FONT][SIZE=2]Assuming that your XP installation is in the default location. You can edit it with notepad and it should be in the root of c:/
Hope this helps
xx
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]Post fail [/SIZE][SIZE=2]
[/SIZE]

Thanks everyone, the info you supplied help me stop this boot up problem.

Many Thanks, what a useful bunch of people you are

:o)