had to reinstall the OS, but the bad OS is still there...?

[folk-telemetry]

Hi, ive read a bunch of posts, and i have to say this is one of the greatest forums ive been on. just real thorough information on behalf of all the responders...

i recently DL'd something that screwed up my OS. the computer wouldnt recognise it even being there.
but i didnt want to install OVER it, because i had a bunch of stuff in the My Documents folder that i didnt want to get erased.
so i installed to the other partition, and everythings fine. i was able to copy files from the old My Documents to the new My Documents.
however, my computer still recognises the old, diseased OS, and gives me the option of booting from it when i start up the thang.
is there a safe way to rid my computer of the old OS? would simply deleting it from the drive solve it? i have no problem erasing the partition it is on. my problem is it nagging me about which OS to start up.

and out of curiousity:
is it possible to reinstall over the OS, and retain all your files in My Computer w/o having to back them up? I recall Win98 doing something similar to that.

thanks again!

[Matridom]

Hi, ive read a bunch of posts, and i have to say this is one of the greatest forums ive been on. just real thorough information on behalf of all the responders...

i recently DL'd something that screwed up my OS. the computer wouldnt recognise it even being there.
but i didnt want to install OVER it, because i had a bunch of stuff in the My Documents folder that i didnt want to get erased.
so i installed to the other partition, and everythings fine. i was able to copy files from the old My Documents to the new My Documents.
however, my computer still recognises the old, diseased OS, and gives me the option of booting from it when i start up the thang.
is there a safe way to rid my computer of the old OS? would simply deleting it from the drive solve it? i have no problem erasing the partition it is on. my problem is it nagging me about which OS to start up.

and out of curiousity:
is it possible to reinstall over the OS, and retain all your files in My Computer w/o having to back them up? I recall Win98 doing something similar to that.

thanks again!

no, it's not safe to delete the parition, however, you can still delete the OS if your carefull about it. What version of windows are running?

[CeeBee]

Best way is to backup your documents (BTW, you should do it anyway, otherwise you'll when your drive fails or when a virus screws them), then copy the documents to the second partition format the first partition and reinstall on it.

[folk-telemetry]

no, it's not safe to delete the parition, however, you can still delete the OS if your carefull about it. What version of windows are running?

Hi Matridom,

im using windows xp home. the hdd has two partitions, C and F. C is where the old messed up one is, and F is where the new one is. [i have no problem keeping it on F]. i basically want to get rid of Windows of the C drive.

[techs]

If you go to Start-Run-msconfig you will see a tab boot.ini In there you can change the timeout to say 2 seconds. You can even semi-hide the old Windows XP where it says something like multi(0)....Windows xp /fast detect by just using the move up/move down button and setting the default. By then setting the time out to 0 seconds it will appear to start without any previous Windows installed. WARNING-If you set it to 0 and you have the wrong default Windows XP you will have to reinstall again cause you will never see that OS again(maybe someone knows how to fix this?) until after you reinstall and change it back from 0.
Another way to do this is to edit your boot.ini file and just remove the offending windows. You face the same problem there since if you delete the wrong one you will have to reinstall again.

[Matridom]

(maybe someone knows how to fix this?)

boot to the recovry console and manualy edit the boot.ini.

Folk, you can safely delete MOST of the information on the main parition, any folders are fair game.

on the c:\ drive, don't delete any of the files excep ones you would have put in, or the page file, otherwise leave that alone.