I'm hoping for help from gemini4 as he was so good with Benyam Dessu and dougiedickson. But help is welcome from anyone. I have a similar problem to dougiedickson but in my case there are two installations of Windows XP Professional. I tried gemini4's solution for dougiedickson - to look at boot.ini via msconfig and click on Check All Boot Paths. But that just responded "It appears that all boot.ini lines for Microsoft operating systems are OK". There was no series of OK's to click and nothing happened that could help me decide which line is for which system.
The text in my boot.ini is as follows;
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
I know that the one I want to remove is on drive D, which Belarc reveals is numbered (3), and the one I want to keep is on drive C which is numbered (2). The one on drive C is in a second partition. C is the only drive that has a second partition. I would have thought that these drive numbers would relate to the numbers in the boot.ini file, but they appear not to? Also although one is shown as default, the screen where the choice can be made at start-up does not default to any one of them, it goes to the one that is highlighted by the user.