Dual booting-esque problem

Alright chaps. Another one for the technophiles out there

My girlfriends computer (running Vista) recently stopped booting up. After trying everything I knew, including system restore, I re-installed vista.

Now, she has two hard-drives. One very full, and one hardly full at all. The latter is where I thought windows was installed, but it wasn't.

So now I there are two hard drives, each with Vista installed. One works, the other doesn't. When the computer boots up it asks which version to boot with. [Isn't that basically Dual/multi-booting... even if its two of the same OS?]

But I guess what my question is, can I delete the bad OS completley and there not be any side effects? I've always been deeply suspicious of meddling with anything in the Windows folder, and I am reluctant to touch it, even if it doesn't work, for fear of buggering the whole thing up entirely.

Any suggestions?

*update*

I've used a boot disk to format the hard drive with the working OS, and am currently re-installing Vista on the original, buggered up OS.

I'll post back here when its finished.

*edit*

Right... so that's done. Now the computer only has one OS on it, definatly. But the SoB still wants to try and dual boot.

I guess that's not a big deal really. Just a mild inconvenience.

What does suck is that the wireless card drivers now don't work. I've found the correct driver files on the 'net and tried to install them, but nothing seems to work. I'm totally stumped.

To strip out the erroneous boot option you would usually just edit the boot.ini file.... until Vista came along and now you need to use the command line tool Bcdedit, which is apparently a pain in the bum!

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=213911&messageID=2188606

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2014/vista_using_bcdedit_boot_up_options_dual_boot_xp_prof

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/bcdedit_reff.mspx

Hope that helps.
Tom

Cheers Tom!

Totally fixed it now. I used Vista Boot Pro to get rid of the pesky extra boot file, and used Driver Agent to fix the bummed driver.

Whilst Driver Agent looks suspicious, it really does the trick. This Chatroom is worth a look for drivers as well.

I know Driver Agent..
Was indeed suspicious, but didn't use it to get the drivers though as you have to pay for that.

I just used it to find the driver I needed/ was missing, then i downloaded from manufacturer's website