Choose Operating System ?

[batleth96]

Working on a dell laptop latitude 400 . when started a screen appears "please select the operating system to start:" then it lists microsoft windows 2000 professional "use up and down to move the highlight of your choice. press enter to choose.seconds untill highlighted choice will be started automatically:xx"
the problem is windows 2000 is listed twice! no matter which one i highlilght i still get the same configured OS .is this a dell thing or is something more serious going on? is it running two versions of 2000? some help would be appreciated . thanks!

[GretaP]

Hi batleth96,

It's quite possible that the boot.ini file has two references to the same installation of WIN2K, but just to ensure that both instances of WIN2K are the same one, do the following:

At the boot menu, select one of the instances of WIN2K. When you're at the Desktop, go to Start>Run and key in cmd then click on OK or hit ENTER (this should open a DOS window). At the C: prompt in the DOS window, key in:
echo %windir%
<ENTER>
The above will display the current Windows folder that you're using (eg., C:\WINNT)
Now, restart, boot into the other instance of WIN2K, and perform the same command in the DOS window. If this also returns the same Windows folder, instead of a derivative of the folder (eg., C:\WINNT2), chances are that both instances of WIN2K are the same one.

I'm not in WIN2K at the moment, but I think the steps are similar (if not exactly the same) as they are in WINXP to edit the boot.ini file........right-click My Computer, select Properties then Advanced tab. In the Startup and Recovery section near the bottom, click on the Settings button. In the System Startup section, click on the Edit button beside "To edit the startup options file manually...." This will open the boot.ini file in Notepad. It probably looks something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout = 30
default = multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT = "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT = "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"

If both of the lines under [operating systems] are exactly alike (as the ones I have above), delete one of the lines. After deleting the one line, go to File>Save and then File>Exit. Click on OK then OK again. Restart your computer.

[batleth96]

Thanks ! As it turned out there were actually two entire operating systems installed .Sice we were wipping the drive anyway I just installed a Fresh copy of 2000 and away we went! Thanks for such a quick response . This site is an invaluable service to those of us becoming a computer expert one crash at a time.lol

[GretaP]

You're welcome for the response. Sounds like someone may have tried to perform an "overinstall" of WIN2K and ended up installing a second instance of the operating system into another folder on the same partition........that actually happens a lot more often than you might think!

This site is an invaluable service to those of us becoming a computer expert one crash at a time

Glad to hear that you like the site.....and that's probably how many of us became "experts"