[elanorbreton]

Hi, hope I'm posting in the right place.

I have a problem every time I start up our pc, it flashes all the usual info up and then goes to a page where it says 'select the operating system to start' and gives a choice of Windows XP Home or XP Media Edition. Before you have a chance to choose, it has defaulted to the XP Home Edition and then just gives us a black screen.

If I repeatedly press F10 while it's starting up, I can get it to stop at the choice page and then select XP Media Edition and it will go on to start up fine. But it obviously shouldn't even be going to that page in the first place, it should just boot up normally and I don't know how to get it right.

I don't know if you would need any pc info to solve this, but it's a 6300 1.86 GHz (2 CPUs), 1GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 7600 GS 256 mb graphics, almost 5 years old.

If anyone can help, please answer in simplistic terms as I am not much good with computers! Thanks heaps.

[simon1990]

try booting into 'safe mode' then edit the boot.ini file or right click my computer. then change the choice duration to 30 secs.

let me kno

[elanorbreton]

Hi and thanks for your reply. When I said I needed a simplistic reply, I wasn't joking, lol!

I can't get it into safe mode and I didn't understand where to go after right-clicking my computer, but I've managed to find a 'boot' file. I assume it's the right one but what do I change in it?

This is how it displays in notepad:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=signature(9283ba5a)disk(0)rdisk(0)partitio n(1)\WINDOWS.1
[operating systems]
signature(9283ba5a)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WIN DOWS.1="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect
signature(9283ba5a)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WIN DOWS.0="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windo ws XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

(I should've mentioned in my original post that it gives me two choices of XP Home Edition, but only the 3rd choice of Media Edition works)

[solosdk]

You have to set the BIOS to boot up the OS you want. On boot up, go to your BIOS(press F12, or depending on your OS), and then select options where you can get to change the boot order.