If your computer has more than one OS installed natively on the system and Windows 7 is one of them, the chances are you will see the option to boot into other “Earlier Version Of Windows” option during the system startup.

So what if the previous Windows OS (doesn’t matter if it’s Windows Vista, XP, 2000 or even older edition) is already removed from the system but for some reason the boot loader didn’t get updated? You basically are seeing this option showing up every time when you turn on the machine.

Here’s how you can delete the unnecessary boot loader entries and straight boot into your Windows 7

First, you need to boot into Windows 7.

Open up the command prompt and type “bcdedit”. Make sure you are running the command line as Administrator.

Here is an example, everybody might have different results when you type the command. Basically it lists out all the OS that has registered to the Windows Boot Manager. For instance, as you can see, there is an entry called “Windows Legacy OS Loader”, the identifier of which contains the value “{ntldr}”. From this, I can tell the Windows Legacy OS Loader used to load Windows XP on this system, since the value of ntldr is default for winxp bootloader.

Now type bcdedit /delete {ntldr} /f

After you see the message “The operation completed successfully”, restart your computer. And you will not see this boot option anymore during the next startup.

“bcdedit” is a powerful command line utility that manages your Windows boot loader. You can not only clean out unnecessary boot entries, but also can create new boot entries manually as well. For more information about how to use the tool, simply type bcdedit /? for help. But be more careful about what you will be doing there, as any deletion operation will be extremely difficult to recover.