Windows 8.1 installed twice (Kinda')

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
1

Backstory: For some reason that I have forgotten at this point, I decided to update the display driver for my 7870 to 14.4 from 13.X, resulting in abysmal framerates in everything for some reason or another. I tried to roll it back to the old driver but had no luck with that, and after wrestling with it for the good part of an hour decided (In a somewhat less than brief lapse of sense) to try AMDs clean install utility. While this did remove everything AMD based, it also apparently bent my PC over the table and... well, yeah. It also uninstalled all my chipset and USB drivers, meaning that I had no mouse/keyboard control in Windows 7. I finally got it back up and running by getting a friend to reinstall everything through Teamviewer. After everything was apparently 'fixed', I go to play Audiosurf and I get an error. I get the same problem with every other game, so at that point I just think sod it, perfect time to upgrade to 8.1.

 

Initially I had a dual boot of Windows 7/8.1, and seeing as though AMD seemed to have messed with the 8.1 partition too, I though it would be better to just start again and install 8.1 from scratch. In my haste to be done with everything (And the fact that it was 2 in the morning), I formatted the 7/8.1 partitions, but somehow missed to 100mb system reserved bit. Now, though I have a perfectly working 8.1, I still get the choice upon boot to choose between 8.1 or 8.1. One boots fine and is what I'm using right now, but the other takes me to a recovery screen with the options of try again, settings, and boot another OS; the latter being the only one that does anything. When I look in disc manager I only have the one system reserved partition still, so I can't delete it or I would screw my current install I would assume.

Is there any way to kill off the non-existent 8.1 clone without completely reinstalling, or am I going to have to start again?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.          

2

You should be able to start msconfig (WinKey+R, type in "msconfig) and delete the faulty boot option.

Here's a page with some more info on msconfig under Windows 8: http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/win8/windows8-msconfig-utility.htm

 

3

Awesome, thanks.

I was using msconfig for something yesterday. That caused a hell of a lot more stress than it required. 

 

4

I don't use it much, but it's always there so. :)

5

Editing msconfig is a good idea to just get rid of the boot entry on startup, however that will still leave a redundant 100MB partition. Nowadays 100MB is somewhat negligible however deleting the extra one might help reduce confusion in the future and just is just more efficient. I would recommend going into Disk Management first: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/disk-management-windows-8.htm

.Then finding and deleting the redundant 100MB system reserved partition. If it doesn't let you in here you can always boot off of a Windows Vista or Win 7 disc and will have option to delete partitions on there. Disk management shouldn't give you the option to delete the reserved partition in use(it will gray it out for you), not sure if it will do the same for an unused system reserve partition. After that's done you can check in msconfigs boot tab and if you still find the extra entry just delete it from there.

6

The problem was that there was only one system reserved partition, as though the old one had merged with the new one; hence why I couldn't delete it. It's all sorted now, but thanks for the input nonetheless. 

7

Ah, weird. No problem.