Multiple OS boot drama

Hello, firstly allow me to give you an idea of how my system is set-up:

I have 2 hard-drives one 120gig IDE and a 250gig SATA, now for performance reasons I use the sata HD to boot windows and the 120gig IDE drive for extra storage. Recently however I wanted to add a second copy of windows (old version of W2000 for nostalgia reasons) so I made a partition of half the capacity on my second IDE drive and intalled W2000 over it. I thought seeing as in bios I had set the sata drive to boot first that I would have to change priority back to the IDE drive to boot W2000 when booting however I was given the choice of OS at startup. This was fine I thought and continued. The problems started when I went to remove it. I dont know what I should have done but I just formatted the partition with W2000 on and resized the old partition on the IDE drive to fill the remaining space (I wouyld have liked to have kept it on there but the computer is used by many others including people who when seeing a screen saying 'which os would you like to boot?' instead of the familiar welcome.. screen would run for the hills claiming witchcraft was afoot. When restarting after deleting the partition with W2000 on however I was still greeted with an OS choice menu that said windows 2000. Hmmm....do a little digging online I thought, which bought me to editing the boot.ini file on C: which at the time looked something like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home Edition" /FASTDETECT
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows 2000 Home Edition" /FASTDETECT

this is just a copy and pasted effort i cant remember at the time what the values were just wanted show what i did..
anyhow i deleted the second line with 2000 inint and rebooted

NOTHING

windows cannot start due to a disk configuration error make sure your disks are setup correctly etc. blah blah.

balls I thought, I haven't got another computer to recover my files from so I formatted my extra storage drive IDE (and lost some unreplacable files doh!) with a copy of winXPso i could accsess the files and undo the change to boot.ini so it would boot again, this went smoothly and I can now boot from my original os installation on my sata drive but the problem I had has not been fixed it now asks me in the os menu if i want to boot MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION or under that WINDOWS default if I click windows default the pc restarts over and over. How do i stop this? This is what my boot.ini file looks like now

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home Edition" /FASTDETECT

I need to get rid of that os choice menu and have the computer boot straight into xp like it used to before i got ****y and started messing around with it
In the startup settings it says windows xp/fast detect.. is set as the defaualt os!!!!
Any ideas or extra info you need, please let me know
P.s. Anyone know any HD recovery freeware progs
that actualy work I got 40 gigs of music I want to get back!!!
Thanks

Check the settings by Right clicking My Computer then choose Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings > System Startup > Edit

Mine for example:

As to data recovery:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139

Thanks Jephree

I tried editing my boot.ini file and thats sorted it, all I have to work out now is how to recover my lost music!

If the above article doesn't help you could try this free program although it would be a long shot if you formatted.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Just to put some kind of closure on the issue, sorted the boot thing by editing my boot.ini file, used loads of different freeware progs to try and recover my stuff got a lot back but the vital, vital, really would take these 2 gigs over the other 38 type vital illuded me. I got chatting to a friend and he had a similar problem some time ago and had bought some software because the freeware wasn't doing the trick so i put my drive into his pc he scanned (it took a few hours!) and there they were, my tunes and recordings I'd sweat over for hours! The program was called File Scavenger and was excellent it showed up tons more stuff the freeware didn't including stuff from 2 installations ago!! So I can heartily recommend this software well worth the money! The only thing it couldn't get back was my 4 gig sample library, oh well good job I bought them on CD!

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

Of course my thanks goes to Jephree for your time and advice, you are a gent sir, (if you are a sir of course!) thank you.

Thanks for the update, the tip, the link, and the thanks!

Let us know if we can help further in the future!


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