Okay, so I just recently bought a SATA 500 GB hard drive and finally figured out how to get Windows XP installed on it...What I did - I installed XP to my old 160 GB drive which was the C drive, then using Maxblast, I had it format the new 500GB drive as a boot drive and it copied over the contents of my C drive to my D drive. I then formated my D drive and I now use it to store stuff like game mods, patches, drives, etc. that I've downloaded.

Anyway, the problem I'm having is that whenever I boot up Windows, it presents me with a boot screen asking me to select two different Windows XP Home Edition installations. The first one when I select it boots up with the error that it could not find /system32/hal.dll and the second one works perfectly and is the Windows I have installed on my new 500 gb drive.

How can I kill this boot screen and make it so it only selects the working Windows and I don't have to select anything?

I'm a little confused here. You copied the contents of your C drive to your D drive and formatted your D drive, correct?

im confused too.... uh....

I think it's a typographical error. I suggest you do a the windows installation again but choose the 500G SATA hdd as your boot drive. It's better than to copy and gets rid of the OS selections screen.

BTW, welcome to PCHF...

ah ok i think i understand. i want you to reformat the new D drive. the 160GB one right? yeah. do a full format, using the windows utility. go into my comptuer, right click, click format. DO NOT do a quick format. do a full format with an NTFS File system. that should make it go away. i warn you, it will take some time

Maybe I should go into a bit more detail and try re-wording it. The way it was set up originally, I had one 160 gb 7200 RPM Maxtor drive - I had it set up so that C had about 130 gb and the rest was set to a D drive so I could store backup files in case I needed to reinstall windows...

So I was running out of space on my drive and decided to get a new 500 gb SATA hard drive. I wanted to copy my C drive to my new hard drive and set that as C, merge the two partitions on my old 7200 RPM and set that as my new D drive.I used Maxblast and Partition Magic to do that but unfortunately in the process of copying the C drive on my old hard drive to my new hard drive some files somehow got corrupt (like MSCONFIG) and wouldn't load properly. So I decided that it would probably be best to do a clean installation of Windows on the new drive...

So I monkeyed around for a while and in the process accidentally formated the old 160 gb drive and lost all my backup data...then subsequently formated the data I had copied over to the 500 gb drive and completely lost all data on both drives. For some reason the 500 GB drive was set as D: and the old one was set to C: (my dad was the one who installed it for me) and I couldn't figure out how to set it to be so that the new one was listed as C: instead of being listed as D:...

I did an install of Windows onto the new drive and it installed fine, only for some reason I couldn't boot the OS without having the WIndows XP CD inserted. If I tried booting it up without inserting the CD it would give me this error: Boot failure, insert system disk and press enter when ready. Trying to solve the problem, I tried doing an install of windows on my old C drive instead to see if that still worked and it did...go to thinking about it and came to the conclusion that it might possibly be because C was set as a boot drive but D wasn't...

So I found an option in Maxblast (included with the hard drive) to formate the drive and make it as bootable so I thought to myself "okay, I'll do that and then reinstall windows on the D drive" but it went further than I expected it to...it formated the D drive, copied all the contents of the Windows installation I had made on my old drive (which was set to C if you recall correctly), set it to bootable and renamed the drive from D to C. So everything works perfectly now except for that annoying boto screen showing up - it doesn't matter what drive I install it to I always get that boot screen.

So I hope this more detailed explanation of what I've gone through can better help you to understand the problem...and hopefully it doesn't mean ANOTHER reinstallation of Windows to fix it because after about four or five attempts I've FINALLY gotten the system back to how I like it and with me having started school it means it'll take even longer to get back up to speed...