2 identical windows xp choices at boot

Hi,
what do you mean by "I tried to reload windows"? Did you install it once again?

Did you happen to install grub2 ? (grub2 doesn't read menu.lst !)

Hello ernst Zlo yes I installed windows again. I'm not sure if I installed grub 2 or not. It's probably what ever the default grub is for ubuntu 9.04_64. How do I find out what version of grub I'm using ? Thanks for your reply !!

If you did nothing to install grub2 you don't have it <g>

So your question has two aspects:
1 you have a second Windows on your computer, which needs space on your harddisk - you have to decide to get rid of it or not.

If you need help with that, please ask another question or better search for that problem first ;-)

2 you have an entry in your /boot/grub/menu.lst and - as far as I understood - you want to get rid of that. The fact, that you have it is now no error, because if you have two windowses there should be two entries.

a) make a backup of your /boot/grub/menu.lst (when you destroy it, you can start a Life CD session to replace it to get your computer working again)

Open a terminal
Application
  Accessoires
    Terminal

enter:
cd /boot/grub
sudo cp menu.lst menu.bck.lst

b) change the line with the windows entry

sudo gedit menu.lst

in the Editor search for line(s) with "title Windows" without the "
If you are lucky you'll find the second one (they are marked yellow (or similar))

change the line (if you found two lines only one of them) to

title TEST-Windows

Save the menu.lst

Reboot.
Look at your menu while starting up if one or two of the entries have changed.

if you don't know and if only one has changed, try out, which windows this is.

oops forgot to answer to your question about what grub is installed

When you see the grub menu (while starting) in the first line you find the version.

Hello Ernst Zlo , as I stated in /menu.lst there is only 1 windows , but at boot up there are 2. Actually now when I boot up there is one choice but when I click that to boot into XP it goes to the next screen where there are 2 choices, and to boot windows I must select "the last known configuration that worked". (sorry if my questions are hard to understand) If you want I can put a copy of menu.lst on here for you to look over, but as I said I've been through it several times and there is only 1 windows entry. ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

The questions are o.k. it's me who's to blame if I don't understand ;-)

Your problem is NOT on the ubuntu side in the menu.lst and NOT GRUB
the line
chainloader +1
indicates, that your menu.lst (and grub) passes the boot process on to another booting device. This is absolutely correct and please don't try to change anything here!

In your case the next boot point it is on your (hd0,0) and this is the Windows side.

You can check this when the second menu appears if there is a line » grub 0.97 « (or similar) on top. (I'm quite sure it is NOT).

The problem you have is the Windows Startup Menu, which you only can solve from the Windows side!
And sorry, I can definitely not help you with windows ...

o.k. I will try to help you there, because you are on Ubuntu
(I am not and never will be like the windows "help desk" who caused me to stop working with that video game, calling itself an operation system!)

mount your windows partition (hd0)

look for the file boot.ini
(a backup is always a good idea!)

it should look like this
----------------------------------
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
----------------------------------
but in your case there are 2 lines with Windows XP

one of them (the partition should be 2 or higher) is the new entry.
Rename it to "Microsoft Windows XP NEW" to tryout first

Boot
check out and if it's the right one = the new XP, this line you can delete in the next Ubuntu session. (afterwards you could remove the partition)

The problem with "the last known configuration that worked" is really a Windows problem. I think you have installed a driver, which is not quite working. But this is really the end of the line for me. I'm off too long of XP to tell you what to do to get rid of that!