What program is being used to chose which OS to boot to?
as well as all the Q's hashonboat is asking.
the easiest way would be with Partition magic. Especially if your not really good with computers. Don't read any more if your not at least an intermediate computer user.
however it is possible to fix all your problems with a win98 start up disk ... (this is assuming the OS you wish to keep is a windows OS)
b4 you do this make a back up of all critical files... documents etc.
also understand that you must make some serious changes to accomplish what you want. First you need to know the size of the partition that you wish to keep. You can find this out from with in the OS While you are in the OS you want to keep give your hard drive a descriptive name like "winXP" or some other identifing name.
after booting with the startup disk "type fdisk at the a: prompt"
first thing you need to do is set active the partition you want to boot to.
Chose option 2. Set active partition
you will know which partition to set active by the name you gave it and use the size to confirm you have the right partition. following the instructions set the partition active.
exit fdisk using the esc key
when back at the a: prompt type "fdisk /mbr"
by setting the partition active and running the mbr command the master boot record will now direct the computer to boot the partition that you marked as active.
you still have wasted space from the other OS
Using fdisk again you can go in and delete the other partition however depending upon whether it is a primary or logical partition the procedure will vary. I would like to wait for you above asked for info first.
If you are using XP and it is XP's boot menu that you see. You can change the default os to boot to as well you can remove others from the boot menu or chose not to even show a boot menu.
this can be found by
press the "Win Key + Pause/Break"
chose the "advanced" tab then "start up and recovery" settings button.