Because my original one buggered up, couldnt find a solution, so just created another one until i did. Is there a way of deleting the original one?

Yes there is.  First save your data and go thru the same reinstall process that you attempted before and in that process you will want to delete all the partitions that XP finds (unless you have moved Data off to another partition).

You will see that Dell has installed a very small partition up front, leave that alone, it is for diagnostics.  Probably what you will see is soemthing like this:

Dell          32mb

C:Windows XP  (size of partition)

D:Windows XP  (size of partition)

You want to delete C & D and manually control the size of the C partition.  Say you have a 40 gig hard drive, you need no more than 15 gigs for XP and your programs, so make the size of that partition 15000megs (15 gigs).  This will levae an unpartitioned psace of 25 gigs that you can formated thru the Computer management Applet and move your data over to it without having to buy a third party program like Partition Magic.

Have all your current drivers downloaded and on removable media before you start!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp

Why do you have two XP partitions?

Geez! thanks for the help! ill look into it.

 

As for the time being is there a way getting the computer to automatically boot to a certain OS.

Yes, what you are seeing now are two options to boot to and the default is the last one used with a default time value of 30 seconds.  There is a way to chnage that defualt boot seletion time to zero,.  If you right clik My Computer and go to Properties and then to the Advanced Tab, at the bootm you will see Startup and Recovery which will list your two boot options.  The default one will be the first one in that drop down box.  The timing options are located there and you can alos edit the boot record to erase the notification for the second partition but I would suggest starting clean again.