Removing a Dual Boot in Windows
Contributed by William_Wilson 
Tagged: Windows installation removing a dual boot can be dangerous, and does not guarentee that windows will forget about the 2nd boot sector, but this will remove the boot option screen and or allow the removal of an OS. Enjoy.
-right click on my computer, select properties
-move to the advanced tab
-under ’startup and recovery’ select settings
-in the new dialog box you have a couple of options:
-if you wish to leave DOS on the machine, but not see the option screen you can simply set the ‘time to display list of operating systems:’ to 0 as winXP should now be ur default OS
-if the removal of dos is your goal, then click edit
-first save a copy of the notepad file which opens ‘boot.ini’ just incase you make a mistake
-now there will be a lines similar to:
[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” /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
*There will also be a line for dos here under [operating systems] something like ‘multi(1)disk(0)partition(#)…..’
-check that your default line points to XP, as it does above
-now erase the line with the other OS, in this case DOS 7.1 ie. ‘multi(1)’ NOTE *the entire line may be more than one line in notepad*
-save the file
-then you are free to erase the folder associated with the erased OS NOTE *if a mistake was made, you may wish to do this as the last step*
-reboot your system and its done.
-upon any mistakes load into either DOS or XP, etc which ever is easiest (or still remaining on your system)
-copy the old boot.ini over the modified one, and try again
-good luck
This is a follow up recipe to the installation of XP on a laptop without a floppy/cd drive:
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tak said on January 26, 2009
If you use knoppix it has a way to manage the drive partitions or edit them. If the second OS is on another partition then you can edit it or delete the partition. Then if you want to merge to another partition you would restart the computer and load knoppix to merge them.
Andrew said on June 3, 2009
i am using win xp and windows 7 i already deleted the windows 7 partition and i want my pc to automatically boot into xp any suggestions for what i should do with boot.ini?
Anonymous said on September 20, 2009
Fine. It works
Aarchei said on February 25, 2010
REally Good…
Thanks a Ton
Anonymous said on March 17, 2010
“-upon any mistakes load into either DOS or XP, etc which ever is easiest (or still remaining on your system)
-copy the old boot.ini over the modified one, and try again”
Doesn’t say WHERE these files can be found. ;)
Pranoy said on April 12, 2010
Same problem iam facing now
my boot.ini file looks like
;
;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.
;
[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” /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /TUTAG=PQGJVW
wht to do with this ??????????
Rob said on July 12, 2010
You need to put the partition back and reinstall windows7.
Once it is installed you need to go into the command prompt as an administrator and use the bcdedit to delete the windows 7 description.
There might be more than one description if you have previously installed windows 7 before.
This is where i got my info from:
http://tinyurl.com/yb9uene
Rob
Tatta said on September 27, 2010
thanks a lot xD
eyestryker said on October 2, 2010
thanks dude it really works.. thank you so much
2000 said on December 19, 2010
worked great, I just unchecked the Display for 30 second box under XP
Samco121283 said on July 29, 2011
I have a dual dual boot pc. Linux Mint 9 and Windows 7. i want to remove linus mint os from my pc. What do i do. pls help.
Ankit Agarwal said on January 24, 2012
i have a dual windows system on different drives. i want to remove win 7 which is on c:, but formating c: will erase my xp boot files stored in c:(system) drive..
What to do?