Remove Unwanted Dual Boot in Vista

Remove Unwanted Dual Boot in Vista



Q: I purchased two copies of Vista, Home Premium 32 bit and Ultimate 64 bit. I was not sure which one I wanted, so I took two 500GB hard drives and put one OS on each. After a few days of switching back and forth from one boot drive to the other in the BIOS, I decided which one I wanted. But now the system comes up with a dual-boot message at start-up. I've removed the other drive, but I'm still getting the dual-boot screen. How can I remove this without starting from scratch and losing everything? Can I do this without a large headache?—William Watson

A: Cleaning up an unwanted dual boot is a lot easier in Windows XP than in Vista. XP's System Configuration Utility (Start | Run | msconfig) has the ability to delete dual-boot information for any operating systems that are no longer present automatically. See "Remove Windows 98 from Dual-Boot" for the skinny on this technique. In Vista it's rather more of an effort, but you can still do it.

Click Start and type cmd, but don't press Enter. You'll see cmd.exe up above; right-click it and choose Run as Administrator. When the Command Prompt opens enter the command BCDEDIT /enum. You should see several entries, including one labeled Windows Boot Manager and two labeled Windows Boot Loader. The latter two represent the two operating systems. There may be other items listed.

Each item will have a number of lines under it including an identifier line, like identifier {current}. Probably the identifier for the Dear Departed OS will take the form of a GUID (globally unique identifier) like cbd971bf-b7b8-4885-951a-fa03044f5d71. The command BCDEDIT /delete {identifier} /cleanup should do the job—here you will replace {identifier} with the actual identifier of the unwanted OS.

This is not something I have done myself; I've just read the instructions you get when you enter BCDEDIT /? and perused Microsoft's documentation on the Web. BCDEDIT will not remove the active operating system, so you should be safe from mistakes. But I'd be remiss if I said there was no chance of screwing up. Why couldn't it be simple, the way it is in XP?