Win XP & Professional In Same HD Partition?

[CobraPilot]

I was given a laptop with "bad" LCD screen, which I fixed via resoldering a bad connection.

Upon initial bootup, I found that the bootloader gave me the option of both Win XP Home and Professional, an unexpected bonus.

Checking further, I found that both versions seemed to be loaded into the same HD partition, which surprised me because I would have assumed each would have to be in its own partition for dual boot. Here is the boot.ini file:

[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\I386
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\I386="Microsof t Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect=OptIn /NoExecute=OptOut

So, both in same HD partition? If so, what keeps them from interfering with each other, which I would have assumed would happen? Or am I misinterpreting the boot.ini file?

[SLK001]

They cannot exist in the same partition. My guess is that someone removed one of the partitions and didn't know how to update the boot.ini file.

Which one shows in the "My Computer/Properties" window? This is the one that is left in the partition. To update the boot.ini file, just remove the line with the nonexistant OS.

[CobraPilot]

SLK001, thanks for your response, but I should have provided more information:

The laptop DOES have both OS's installed and WILL boot into whichever one I select.

Device Manager shows only a "Partition 0" with "DRV1_VOL1(C)" as the only HD or partition. (There is a colon after the C, but this posting system tries to turn that into a smiley.)

[SLK001]

I see it now... They are installed in different directories.

XP Pro is the OS that you really want to keep. I would just erase the Home directory.

Well, really, I would extract the Windows Key from the XP Pro registry and just reformat and reinstall XP Pro.

[DB83]

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