[Jitter]

A guy I knows computer just started rebooting before windows fully loaded up and he ended up installing XP Pro on the same partition that he had Home on. Now when he restarts it gives him a choice which one to boot into. I told him that he should just reformat, but he doesnt really want to do that and he only has about a 30GB HD. Is there anyway to remove the home installation w/o having to reformat?

thanks

[shadowfield]

hmmm, if he installed over home with pro, a good majority or even all of the files from home were probably just over written by pro copies. So basicaly, there shouldnt be anything of importance to remove

i agree with reformat and starting scratch ^_^

[Jitter]

well hes saying he has 2 windows folders windows1 and windows........so for some reason stuff didnt seem to get overwritten. I am not sure what he did exactly

[shadowfield]

in that case, i dont really think you can just uninstall the os, your going to have to delete it manualy..... i think

so figure out which os owns which windows folder, and delete the home one

then edit out the home entry in the BOOT.INI( located in system root but is hidden )

but then again, ive never been in a situation like that... and dont currently have time or a home cd to try so try what i said if you have no other choice... or trust my judgement and try anyways.

[Jitter]

I think ill tell him just to suck it up and reformat. I think his HD will be a mess otherwise

[CDsDontBurn]

well, if it is set up as two seperate partitions, then it can be done. Using a program like partition magic, you can remove the first installation of winXP (home) and just move over and expand the second installation of winXP (pro). But to me it sounds more like winXP pro was installed over winXP home. The best solution is to just reformat. If the winXP pro installtion wasn't done too long ago, then he shouldn't be attached to that installation of windows anyways.

[PangingJr]

he will have to make a backup of whatever he needs on the system anyway, reformat/reinstall would be the best choice, i think.

it can be done but the big problem i can think of would be how we can assist him to do it right, especially, when working together on another system remotely with someone who you don't know him at all, like something that he might do while you don't want him to do and you forgot to tell him.. take or pick a wrong steps when it's supposed to be last or first, we always forget something, well communication is a must.. another thing would be the Windows registry, some of them will be updated after one of the Windows been removed, but i'd say it's still will be full of references that would not get updated, never have this problem myself so can't really tell for sure. edit out the unwanted entry in the boot.ini is not a problem and can be done last.

[CDsDontBurn]

tell him to just do another clean install of windows. it is absolutely the best way to do it, especially if he doesn't want any major problems down the road.