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My PC asks me what version of Windows I want to run?

I had Windows XP home edition on my computer and then I installed XP Professional. I thought it would format the hard drive and erase XP Home edition, but now when I start the computer, it always ask which one to choose, home edition or professional. How can I tell it to always choose professional?

Dave's Answer:

There are two possibilities here - one, you actually have two Windows installations, or two, your boot menu just thinks there are. Microsoft writes about this situation in Knowledge Bulletin #Q289022, but hopefully my answer will get you going faster anyway.

If you select the XP Home boot menu option, and it either boots into XP Pro, or doesn't boot at all, you're correct in that you only have one Windows installation. If you select the XP Home option and you can boot into your old XP Home installation, then you either have two
Windows installations on one partition, or somehow ended up with two partitions each with a Windows installation.

If they have both Windows installations, I would strongly recommend backing up your data and starting from scratch, deleting all your partitions, creating a new one, and installing XP Pro.

What you probably have, if you formatted your partition during the XP Pro installation, is a single XP Pro installation with an inaccurate boot menu. When you format or delete a partition on your hard drive, it doesn't wipe your Master Boot Record (MBR).

The MBR is the first sector on your hard drive, which contains information on how to boot your operating system. Since this isn't a part of the partitions on your system, it still exists as it was before even after formatting or deleting all the partitions on your drive.

Then when you installed XP Pro, it saw your MBR had information to boot XP Home. Windows setup then assumes you need to boot both operating systems, and sets up the boot menu accordingly. This same thing commonly happens when you reinstall Windows on a drive, even when it's the same version. If you reinstall XP Home on a drive that already had XP Home, you frequently end up with two boot menu options for XP Home.

If it's just an extra boot menu option, fortunately this is easy to fix.

Click Start, right click on My Computer, and click Properties.

Click the Advanced tab.

Under "Startup and Recovery", click Settings.

Here, in the "Default operating system" drop down box, you will see two choices. You can manually edit your boot.ini, the file containing the list of operating systems that can be booted, but I would not recommend this unless you're familiar with boot.ini's cryptic format.

If you get it wrong, your system isn't going to boot anymore and it can be ugly to get fixed. The easy, trouble-free way to get rid of this menu is to just uncheck the "Time to display list of operating
systems" box, and make sure XP Pro is selected in the drop down box.

Click OK, and click OK again. Then restart your system, and you'll see the boot menu is gone.

Here's another way you can accomplish this:

1.. Access the Run command and type Msconfig.exe in the text box and click OK.
2.. Select the Boot.ini tab.
3.. Highlight the line under [operating systems] that contains "Microsoft Windows XP Professional"
4.. Click the "Set as Default" button.

When you're done, just click Apply or OK. When you click OK, the System Configuration Utility displays a dialog box and prompts you to restart the computer in order for the changes to take effect.

Here's another solution that's more tricky, but will work if the previous doesn't seem to help:

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.

2. On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup
and Recovery.

3. Under System Startup, click Edit.

4. In the Edit window, you'll see the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems]
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional"
/fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows xp
home" /fastdetect

It'll look like this:

Remove the Windows XP Home line. Be very careful to delete only the Windows XP Home else you may harm your system.

Thanks to Colin, Chris Buechler, John Marshall and Deaglos for their assistance.

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Comments

Question please. My Compaq laptop has Windows XP Home as the OS and an AMD Turion 64 processor. Does that mean I have a 64 bit version of Windows? How can I tell?

Many thanks,

Howard

Posted by: Howard Grey at December 30, 2005 6:11 PM

Howard, I have to admit that Microsoft doesn't make it easy to figure out if you're running a true 64-bit Windows or not, as far as I can tell, so hopefully someone else can pop up and offer advice on this subject.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 1, 2006 11:18 AM

I had Windows XP home edition on my computer, with all my fave programs and software and then I installed XP Professional on a different partition. My pc now only boots to the pro edition. It does not display a menu, while I still can see all my application on the home edition, I cannot access them. Any remedy please?

Posted by: Mohammed at February 5, 2006 2:56 AM

I am running Windows XP Home.When I take digital pictures they download fine but when I try to save them to My Pictures it won't save them.It only saves them to local disc.Is there some settings I can change to get it to save them to My Pictures?????

Posted by: Marshall at October 4, 2006 7:34 PM

Thankyou very much for this helpful piece of information. Very much appreciated.

Posted by: Phil Zadarnowski at February 16, 2007 6:58 AM

have installed two windows xp pro in one partition. can i delete one of the windows installed. if yes, how?
thanks

Posted by: Roberto at February 19, 2007 4:06 PM

thanks so much! I've been looking around for this exact answer.

Posted by: Jarmer at March 20, 2007 12:34 PM

Thanks, I did the msconfig process... On the boot.ini tab, I wasn't sure which version of xp was the right one, so I clicked the "check all boot paths" button, and it told me which one was bad, and asked if I wanted to delete it. Just though you might want to add that as an option, as it is nice and easy for us noobs. Thanks again!

Posted by: Pete Rawson at March 26, 2007 12:31 AM

i have Windows XP home edition , but i don't like , i want XP pro.
but i have a problem , i have only one partition and some one told me if i installed the new windows i will lose every thing .
can i have the XP pro without losing all my data?

thanks

Posted by: Adam at May 20, 2007 6:39 AM

thanx for this info, i had two xp pros to choose from at boot after what i thought was a clean install, i unchecked the "time to display the list of operating systems" and its sorted. cheers :-)

Posted by: marc at May 25, 2007 8:54 AM

Thanks, I was looking for this all over the internet. ;-)

Posted by: David at April 18, 2008 3:58 PM

How to find out which version of Windows OS in My PC. bcoz when I need to install Windows Installer 3.1 it asking which version of OS is there.

Posted by: Ujitha at May 22, 2008 10:42 AM

dude u're da best..
keep on going bro...
xD

Posted by: NeTsPyDeR at May 23, 2008 1:50 PM

I do not get how to do your last option, after reading it several times I can't understand the reason for two different displays for the same [boot loader].

"Remove the Windows XP Home line. Be very careful to delete only the Windows XP Home else you may harm your system.". Can't figure out what to do here, remove a line or just 3 words or????

Posted by: Anil K. at September 10, 2008 10:34 AM

hi there, I have a laptop and i had to format the hardisc with the HP recovery sector that i got with the laptop. but i made some mistake in selecting the options.

now i have a completely new windows however with only 4GB space in my C drive. i think my old windows is still about somewhere but i dunno how to open it back !

please kindly help
thanks

Posted by: Felix at October 15, 2008 6:38 PM

my xp professional crashed i only have disc for xp home when i go to put xp home disc in it tells me i can't because there is a newer version that already exists on there how do i fix this thank you

Posted by: kathy at February 5, 2009 10:44 AM

My Dell computer had a failing hard drive. the repairman replaced it and saved my data. he installed xp home edition. When i got the computer home I started to install xp professional edition (I thought I was installing something else--don't ask). Now I can't get rid of the professional edition.
I am afraid of losing the data the repairman was able to save. I am on about the third screen of the installation of the professional edition which does not go away even when I restart the computer. Can you help me save the data and get rid of the professional edition?
Thanks for any help you can give me.

Posted by: lmartin at May 19, 2009 1:57 PM

problem while booting

after starting system the screens shows as follows

1.windows xp
2.windows xp set up

and i cannot even install new xp

if i insertb a bootable cd and start rebooting, after selection of ""new installation""

the message apears as

"please insert cd named windows xp professional sp2 and press enter""

even with the cd the installation does not proceed
hw i can format my system

pls help

Posted by: sachin at July 19, 2009 7:46 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!