Mbr wrote

My computer has one 80 gig hard drive, with 2 partitions.
The C:\ drive has 10 gigs and has the operating system on it
(Windows XP Pro), and the rest of the drive's space is on D:/

My computer began having errors a few weeks ago,

What sort of errors ?

so I contacted the guy who I bought the computer from, to fix it.
He reinstalled Windows, and all seemed to go well. But it turns out
that he simply installed a 2nd copy of Windows on drive D:\ and also
left the original install of Windows with the errors on it on drive C:\

So I contacted a friend who knows computers

Looks like he doesnt know that much.

and told him the situation, and he was able to fix the original install of
Windows on drive C:\ and erased the unwanted install of Windows from D:\

The computer works fine now, but now I'm stuck with "Please
select the operating system to start" whenever I boot the computer.
There's 2 choices, and both say "Microsoft Windows XP Professional".
I always choose the first one. I'm afraid of what might happen if I
choose the 2nd option, which would attempt to load an install of
Windows thats no longer there.

It should just fail that boot.

My friend told me that there's no way to get rid of this choice menu on bootup.

He's wrong.

I can live with the choice menu,

You can manually edit the boot.ini so you dont get the choice anymore.

but now I tried to use Drive Image from a boot CD to make a backup
of drive C:\ to image files on drive D:\, so I can burn them on CDs,
for a quick and easy recovery in the event of a future catastrophe.

Drive Image is way past its useby date now. Use True Image.

But Drive Image will not recognize the partitions of C:\ and D:\.
It only shows one partition with the drive letter of *

Is this because of the operating system choice menu?

Nope. Likely something to do with what the second fella did.

Or has the MBR been changed when the choice menu was installed?

Nope.

Here's my boot.ini
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Just manually delete that last line, its from the install on the D drive.

Will erasing the 2nd choice from my boot.ini remove the choice menu

Yes.

and allow Drive Image to recognize the 2 seperate partitions?

It wont affect that.

Or do I also have to use a program such as fdisk
or gdisk to write a new MBR to the hard drive?

It likely wont make any difference to the Drive Image problem.

I'm concerned about doing this because.....will writing
a new MBR also make my partitions inaccessible?

Shouldnt do, but its not too clear what the second fella has done
and it isnt clear if Drive Image would have always shown that problem.

See what True Image makes of the drive.

Please respond with any advice you can give.