I had Win XPPRO and Win2K on seperate drives on the computer. With my MSI board I can hit F11 on startup and choose which drive and system to boot (XP was installed first). Recently, I added a third drive and did a clean install of XP Pro. However, if I try F11 to boot to the new edition of XP, the old one come up instead. And If I choose the drive with win2k on it I get a boot.ini file that lets me choose between win2k and the new XP install. I tried just removing boot.ini but that makes the new version of XP and win2k inaccessible. Obviously there is something in the new XP install pointing to the win2k drive (that's where the boot.ini file is located). win2k is on an ide drive and the two XP loads are on SATA drives. I want to get rid of the book loader and just use f11 directory to choose which version and drive to boot from. Anybody know how to do that? All the OS are running NTFS files.

Just some articles that may help. Maybe you can figure out: The Purpose of the Boot.ini File in Windows XP HOW TO: Edit the Boot.ini File in Windows XP Print the articles to use as reference.

Wayne, Here's what I think happened. I don't have a MSI board so I'm just guessing but when you say you hit f11 I'm thinking that takes you to the bios to choose which drive to boot from. Or that is a special option in the bios for that board to boot which drive to boot from. When you installed the first XP and 2k you did it independently of each other without the other drive being connected to the computer. Which would give you boot files to each operating system on their own drive. Then when you pressed f11 and your board booted to either drive it would hit the boot files on that drive. This is not a dual boot configuration it is two separate os independent of each other. Now, when you installed the second XP you left the other drives connected to the computer and the XP installation saw it as a dual boot and it saw the 2k installation as the primary one. In this case it put the boot files for itself in the root of the 2k drive and set the file to dual boot with the 2k and itself. So when you boot to the 2k drive the boot files from the second XP give you the dual boot option. To fix this and be able to boot the way you describe you will have to do 2 things. 1.Take out the first XP drive and 2k drive and hook up the last drive as master on the primary ide cable. Do a repair install of XP on that drive. Or heck if you haven't got a lot of programs and stuff on it, do a regular install. It takes about the same amount of time. When you are done put all the hard drives back. 2.Edit the boot.ini when logged into the 2k os to get rid of that dual boot option. You can either press the Windows key + pause and go to advanced then startup and recovery and pick the 2k and set the time to 0. Or you can actually edit the boot.ini. It should look 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" /fastdetect The formatting of this page might be wrong but anything after [operating systems] is on one line in my boot.ini

Thanks domass. I think you hit it right on the head.