Hi,

I have recently puchased a Packard Bell laptop (Win XP home SP1, centrino 1.4, 512 MB RAM). When it boots up i get an option to load either Windows XP or the Windows XP recovery console. There is a time limit to respond which expires before ive read the rest but XP loads as expected and works fine after that.

Does anyone know how to stop getting this prompt or (more importantly) why ive started to get it in the first case!

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated because i can't find anything on this on the web.

Thanks,

Stephen

Your boot.ini file contains the options to display at boot time.
If you do not want a particular option you can remove it or hide it in the boot.ini file.

To learn how and to understand a little about boot.ini files go to my website (Homepage link) and look up the section titled "All you ever wanted to know about boot.ini files".

Incidentally in some installation the recovery console is a useful mechanism put in place to allow you to use it to fix problems in your main OS. This may be the case in yours. If so you may want to retain it and change the timeout in the boot.ini file to a very small value so that it does take too long before using the default option.

If you do remove an option from the boot.ini then you would also need to uninstall / remove the associated installation otherwise you are wasting disk space occupied by the removed option.

Hope it helps.

___________________________________________
☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Leave it. It gives you the option to boot to the recovery console. You can change the time in the START-RUN-MSCONFIG-BOOT.INI. You may need it in the future.

The second article tells how to add or remove an O.S. from the boot.ini file.
The Purpose of the Boot.ini File in Windows XP

HOW TO: Edit the Boot.ini File in Windows XP

Thanks for the quick replies and the recommended reading, both very helpful!

I think i will keep it as i now agree that it might well be handy in the future.

However, my laptop is only 1 week old and im 99% sure that it booted without this option untill the last few days. Is there any reason why it would start to appear now?

Thanks again,

Stephen

No idea why it should suddenly appear but be thankful it did. It is probably the most useful tool that MS put into XP.