Below assumes both that you have a floppy drive, and that you are not
normally booting from a SCSI drive:
1. If this is your first time doing this sort of thing, format a
diskette under W2k (and ONLY W2k) and copy to it these files from the
directory where you found boot.ini (see #3 below about boot.ini):
ntldr
ntdetect.com
boot.ini
(You will need this diskette to undo any mistake you make below. Test
this diskette by booting from it as soon as you have created it. You
should see exactly what you see when booting from the hard drive; if you
don't, recreate the diskette, more carefully. Also, by the way, make
sure your BIOS boot sequence is Floppy first, Drive0 second.)
2. Choose the OS you wish to keep. Make sure it is running well. Note
carefully the name of its root directory. Note carefully the exact text
you see on that boot-choice screen for both systems (use the pause key &
write it all down.)
3. Backup and then edit the boot.ini file in the root directory of your
system drive. Boot.ini is a small text hidden/system file; if you can't
see it at first, you must remove the "hidden" and "system" attributes.
If you don't know how to do this, go to a command prompt and type
attrib /?
and learn about the attrib command. Once you have removed these
attributes, copy boot.ini as boot.old in the same directory, for safety.
Then use notepad or any other text editor to print boot.ini, again for
safety. Then remove all references TO THE SYSTEM YOU DON'T WANT from
boot.ini, and print it, and save it. Do all this as carefully as you can.
4. Then reboot from the hard drive as usual. Your system should boot
directly to the system you want. If it doesn't, you made a mistake
somewhere in boot.ini. To recover, you must reboot from the diskette,
and then correct the error(s) in the boot.ini on the hard drive.
5. If you do boot directly to the system you want, and after a
significant time are satisfied that it's really operating well, you can
then delete the directory for the UNWANTED system that the original
boot.ini pointed to, including all its subdirectories. This will free up
the disk space that unwanted software uses, and have no other effect.
It's not a required step, and you might well want to keep that other
system sort of hidden but recoverable just in case something cripples
your main system someday. You would boot to that old system by again
booting from the floppy and choosing that old system.
