XP Booting - Annoying Message

Status
Not open for further replies.

stehodges

Baseband Member
Messages
31
Have recently wiped a computer with XP installed. It previously had two HArd drives, with XP on them both. Upon booting I used to be able to select which Operating system to boot.
The main hard drive has been formatted, and the secondary drive removed. It all works fine, but when i boot it up i get the message asking if i want to boot

1. Windows XP Professional
2. (BLANK)

And it gives me 30 seconds to choose one

I did a clean install, does anyone know how to remove this request?
 
Sure, with XP, right click on My Computer and goto properties. Goto the advanced tab and click on "Settings" in the Startup and Recovery section. Uncheck the "Time to display list of operating systems" option bit.
 
Cheers, wasnt quite what I meant, i wanted to remove the second option but you pointed me in the right direction!
Thanks
 
lol......ok for clarification. Click "Edit" on that same screen and then manually anything under the first selection.
 
What you want to look for is the boot.ini, your system is looking for another bootable partition. By clicking in the "edit" button, the system opens the boot.ini file and shows you the list of bootable options. If you are going to have just one operating system, then all you will need is one OS entry.

If you have one partition, it should have one entry similar to this:


[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
:D
 
That is a good question. If you want more info on boot.ini switches, you can go here.

The short answer, to help avoid malicious code execution...:)


Long answer:

/NOEXECUTE

This option is only available on 32-bit versions of Windows when running on AMD64 processors and only when PAE (see the /PAE switch) is also enabled. It enables no-execute protection, which results in the Memory Manager marking pages containing data as no-execute so that they cannot be executed as code. This can be useful for preventing malicious code from exploiting buffer overflow bugs with unexpected program input in order to execute arbitrary code. No-execute protection is always enabled on 64-bit versions of Windows on AMD64 processors.

I believe this switch also works in Intel processors because the computer that I used to copy the boot.ini file is running a Intel Mobile P4 2.8Ghz processor.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom