When I installed Vista Beta 2 on my MacBook, I had to do system recover to fix the installation. After the system got recovered, I have two entries in the boot screen. To fix this problem in Windows XP, just edit the boot.ini file in C: . However, I couldn’t find boot.ini in Vista. I found that now instead of editing boot.ini, you need to use bcdedit.exe to edit the boot configuration.
To use bcdedit, first bring up Command Prompt windows using an administrator credential. If you don’t know how to do this, please refer to step 1 ~ 3 in this post. Type in bcdedit to see a list of boot manager and boot loaders.
c:>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=DeviceHarddiskVolume1
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
displayorder {50c73d4f-e6b3-11da-bc73-d30cdb1ce216}
{current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 5
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {50c73d4f-e6b3-11da-bc73-d30cdb1ce216}
device partition=DeviceHarddiskVolume1
path Windowssystem32winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice partition=DeviceHarddiskVolume1
systemroot Windows
resumeobject {50c73d50-e6b3-11da-bc73-d30cdb1ce216}
nx OptIn
detecthal Yes
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path Windowssystem32winload.exe
description Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate (recovered)
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot Windows
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
From the list, we can see that the boot loader named Microsoft Windows is the one that’s not needed. The identifier for this boot loader is {50c73d4f-e6b3-11da-bc73-d30cdb1ce216}. We can use this info to delete it.
c:>bcdedit /delete {50c73d4f-e6b3-11da-bc73-d30cdb1ce216}
The operation completed successfully.
c:>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=DeviceHarddiskVolume1
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 5
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path Windowssystem32winload.exe
description Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate (recovered)
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot Windows
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
We can see that the boot loader is now gone. There is one more change that I’d like to do. Look at the one and only boot loader, the description is Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate (recovered). I wanted to change it to just Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate. Here is what I did to change the description.
c:>bcdedit /set {current} description "Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate"
The operation completed successfully.
c:>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=DeviceHarddiskVolume1
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 5
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path Windowssystem32winload.exe
description Windows (TM) Vista Ultimate
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot Windows
resumeobject {f5346d3d-0236-11db-b7af-806e6f6e6963}
Note that instead of using a long identifier, you can use just {current} to modify this boot loader. After the changes, you won’t see the boot screen again since there is only one boot loader.
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