Anyone looking for a challenge? RE: XP to W7

[draceena]

Hi everyone!

I usually am here helping others but I've finally been stumped and am wondering if anyone can help me.

My husband had XP Pro installed, and had used Mint4Win (it's a program much like Wubi where it installs a Linux OS in Windows but is not a true dual-boot). He had also installed the XP Recovery Console a while back to fix some issues. So, in the end, anytine he would boot, he would have 3 options. The XP OS, the Linux OS or the XP Recovery Console.

Yesterday he finally decided to give Windows 7 a go. He copied all his data to another drive then just installed the Windows 7 straight over the XP Install. Everything worked fine in the install and when the system finally rebooted so he could start using W7 he had 4 boot options. W7, the Old XP, the Linux and the Recovery Console!

From what I can tell W7 picked up all the items from the XP bootloader and made them it's own.

Not needing the "old XP" file, he was able to delete it from the drive but also wanted to remove it and the Recovery Console options from the boot menu. To do this he installed Easy BCD. The "old XP" menu item was there and he could delete it just fine but the Recovery Console option was no where to be found.

Since then, we've looked everywhere to get rid of this option with no success. We checked under msconfig > boot, only W7 was there. We tried to boot from the W7 DVD and do the recover options there, no dice. We tried the drop to console from the W7 DVD and tried the fixmbr commands and still this option will not go away.

For now, we are just leaving it as it is not causing any issues but are fearful that once the W7 RTM is in our hands and he installs over the RC that this menu wierdness will still be there and we'd like to deal with this now if possible.

Thanks for reading, hope you can point us in the right direction.

 

[Ian]

Would you be doing a clean install for the RTM? If so, you could remove the partition and then re-create it during the install and then that should give you a clean slate Seems strange that EasyBCD doesn't show it up

Do you have a boot.ini file in your root dir? Windows 7 doesn't use this, but I'm wondering if there are some elements left behind from XP. If you do have this file, could you post the contents here?

 

[draceena]

Thanks for responding Ian. At first we were thinking of the install over top route but since this happened we've more or less changed our minds (unless it could be fixed beforehand).

We did look for a boot.ini file and any other files that would be from the old XP install and did not find anything.

We also thought it unusual that this Recovery Console cannot be seen in Easy BCD or in msconfig and all the "fix" commands for the boot member do not change anything.

The biggest reason we want to do the install over top is so that we can keep the Linux OS (plus boot selection) as is since it looks like W7 does a great job of leaving it alone. If we absolutely must nuke & pave we'll just have to survive a reinstall of the Linux ans chalk it all up to a learning experience.