i partitioned my hard drive with partition magic so i can have windows 7 tiny and xp (i tried with disk management but it wouldnt let me) but something went wrong with the partition and when it rebooted my pc wouldnt boot up, just black screen with IIIIIIII in top left corner. The only thing i could do was reinstall xp and i chose the option keep current file system and it went ok. I then partitioned the drive properly this time, when i rebooted it partitioned and formatted it before windows started. but now when i turn it on it has 2 windows xp installed in the same partition, the 1st one is the new one that i didnt even want and the 2nd one is my old one that i want to keep. both work fine now. so how do i uninstall the newest OS? i dont want to mess about again formatting and reinstalling and i dont want to lose all my settings or have to download every single update for xp again
you need to edit boot.ini, but you have to know what you're doing. easier way is to delete the partition containing the unwanted install, then run 'check boot paths' on the boot.ini tab in msconfig.
Wait, have you actually installed the Win 7 Tiny yet? If not, I'm thinking you did the partitions wrong But anyways, the easiest way to delete the other partition is as loony said: go back to your original XP install and reformat it using your software of choice (Partition Magic?) . Then you SHOULD have an empty partition. Deleting the boot.inf entry is another thing though. See if this works first.
i had to do full reinstall twice. first time i put xp on the new partition and then when it was all set up and working i formatted the first partition(original install) but when i reset pc it just said error loading operating system, so had to reinstall again on first partition. windows was still on the 2nd partition i just dont know why it didnt start, maybe something was telling it to boot fron C and not F? anyway, much downloading of xp updates later im finally sorted and back to where i started. im going to try again with a different partition tool, win xp device manager doesnt give me the option to partition my c drive
try computer management in control panel -> administrative tools. It's probably limited in what it will allow you to do with the system drive though. You probably want a 3rd party program such as paragon partition manager.
What would of been easier is, installing EasyBCD and then editing the bootloader. Then you could of easily deleted the partition.
