[Pro] dual boot xp / xp - help!

I need some advice in how to proceed here. For various reasons I would like to have two XP installs on my computer, one being my 'old' XP system and one being my freshly installed 'new' XP system.

So I put a new hard drive in my system and intalled a fresh windows, then I plugged the old bootable drive into my secondary master connector. So far so good.

I then tried using bootmagic 8, but the copy I own is a couple of years old, and installing it caused me nothing but grief, including some panicy moments when I thought that I had destroyed one of the drives.

Anyways, bootmagic doesn't seem all that NTFS friendly and I figure there has to be a better way. In theory, setting this up should be dead simple. Both installs work on their own, and they are on separate drives. I just need a small GUI that will let me choose which one to boot on.

Any suggestions?

At this point, can u boot in both installations?(I doubt it...)
By the way, u know that u should have 2 legitimate copies of xp...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gioannou

At this point, can u boot in both installations?(I doubt it...)
By the way, u know that u should have 2 legitimate copies of xp...

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Who says I don't?

Anyways, I can boot from either drive as long as I physically switch the primary and secondary cables. I suppose if I switched the drives in BIOS that would also do it.

I know that XP has a native ability to dual boot, and I was more wondering if anyone knew how to enable it. Failing that, there must be a decent NTFS bootloader program kicking around somewhere.

"By the way, u know that u should have 2 legitimate copies of xp..."



I have to call bull**** on that one.

It is OK to install multiple instances of the same copy of Windows on the same machine, you can only boot into one at a time after all. MS even recommend it for certain things.

Ice9, what you did wrong was to install the second instance of WinXP while the drive was disconnected, so the bottl;oader didn't see it. The easiest way of fixing things is to connect bothe drives, then boot into trhe working XP, go to Start>Run>Msconfig>Boot.ini tab, and click "Check all boot p[aths". That should then give you a bootloader screen each time you boot where you can choose which instance of Windows to boot into.

Thanks SuperSparks - that sounds like the right track, but when I tried it a message came up as follows: "it appears that all BOOT.INI lines for Microsoft operating systems are OK"

can I manually enter the proper lines in here?

Do u see 2 lines under the "[operating systems]"?
If u do then it should be OK

Please could you post your Boot.ini file (it's a hidden file in the root folder of C:). You may have to set your Folder Options to "Show hidden files and folders", and then uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" before you can see it. Also, please can you tell us exactly what drives/partitions each OS is installed on.

Here is the boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

Here is my disk information:

Disk 1

J: FAT 47 MB None Primary
C: NTFS 40 GB Active Primary (new XP install)
* Extended 112 GB None Primary
H: NTFS 56 GB None Logical
I: NTFS 56 GB None Logical

Disk 2

F: NTFS 40 GB Active Primary (old XP install)
* Extended 17 GB None Primary
G: FAT32 17 GB None Logical
* Unallocated 8 MB None Primary

The J: drive may seem a bit strange but I had to add that after the fact to install bootmagic.

Actually now that I look at this, I am starting to think that maybe I should reformat Disk 1 and start again, and just pray the XP will detect the other install this time.