Accidentally installed XP 64 over my regular XP home edition.

Caxus

I had intended to test out the trial of windows xp 64 bit on my second hard drive but i forgot to switch boot drives in my bios before i did it. I formatted the correct one and everything but it seems to have installed xp 64 on my main harddrive.

Nothing got erased, its just annoying that now it asks me which os i want to boot every time i turn on my computer. Is there any way to get rid of it or should i just format it and start over?

Buddha16

If you go into your system properties (right-click My computer then properties), then hit the advanced tab and then hit the startup and recovery settings button. In the sartup and recovery window it shows you the default operating systems: you can either just turn the seconds down on the display time or hit the edit button to edit the boot.ini file and delete the version you don't want.

Example:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional X64" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

You would want to delete the one in red.
Hope this helps.

Caxus

Ok, thanks.

My next question is how much harddrive space am i wasting by having a second OS installed and is there any way to remove the 64bit version completely?

RWB

Depends.... maybe 1GB

Caxus

And it didn't screw anything up by installing it over windows xp home?

Enverex

If it upgraded it will have upgraded, thus no issues. If it didn't upgrade it then it would have completely deleted your previous XP install before installing the 64bit version, so either way nothing should be "screwed up". Afaik Windows wont let you install 2 copies of windows onto the same partition, so either you HAVE installed it to the other drive or you've actually upgraded your old install.

Caxus

Enverex wrote:

If it upgraded it will have upgraded, thus no issues. If it didn't upgrade it then it would have completely deleted your previous XP install before installing the 64bit version, so either way nothing should be "screwed up". Afaik Windows wont let you install 2 copies of windows onto the same partition, so either you HAVE installed it to the other drive or you've actually upgraded your old install.

Nope, it did let me install two. I had formatted a different partition than the one that windows ended up installing on. It was asking me which to load each time i would boot up. I got rid of the selection prompt but now i'm wondering if anything is screwed up and if there's any way to completely remove the 64 from my system.

Enverex

If you've removed it from the boot list, as long as the partition where you have the new install on is the one marked as bootable and is the one classed as the actual boot drive, you should be ok to just format the other partition (or at least delete the old Windows manually as there isn't actually an uninstal).

Caxus

Well the point was that i was just trying to test out this trial version of xp 64 on my secondary (smaller/older) harddrive. I ended up formatting THAT drive but intalling xp 64 on my main drive. I don't want to format my primary drive unless i have to but its annoying to know that there's this phantom os on it taking up space.

I've already correctly installed the xp 64 on the drive that i had originally intended to. Is there a way to get rid of it completely on my main drive? Is it likely to ever cause any problems having that second OS on there?

Enverex

How many partitions do you have on that drive?

Caxus

Just one.

Enverex

Well then you only have one copy of Windows installed. It wont let you install another copy of Windows onto the same partition as an existing copy, which means other than that phantom boot menu item, you shouldn't actually have another copy of Windows installed anymore.