need dual boot advice

[LotusAstra]

Totally aggree DVOM, i'd personally not use the windows boot manager again (been there when i started multi booting and ended up starting from fresh to change things) cuz it makes things too complicated should one decide to move things about at a later date, yes it will do whats wanted if you plan on using ME and XP forever but it has an awful crude way of going about it that makes things dificult upon future OS upgrades...

Best way i feel is to use a 3rd party boot manager as said by someone above that will hide each OS from the other meaning nothing is shared between them and each OS can be treated as a separate PC, gives no problems at a later date and all OS's can be installed or removed in any order, just so much easier to manage especially if u'r into using backup images.

And yes with a 3rd party boot manager you could have 2 or 3 WinME's onboard, without having to install it for each separate drive/partition u could clone the exact same installation of ME to other partitions if u like.

I use Partition/Boot Magic myself but there are free alternatives out there as mentioned!

Regards

[Ice9]

Originally posted by DVOM
Ice9, you've said (I believe) that you want to slowly migrate to a newer system. The problem with letting XP or w2k handle the boot process is that it will put its boot files on the C: drive. If you then ever want to get rid of ME you'll also be getting rid of XP's boot files.

Thanks DVOM (and LotusAstra), this would have really bitten me if I went that route because I do plan to eventually format the old drive and put something else on it.

I have decided to get a boot manager - but it isn't easy to decide which one - every single one on Download.com has horror stories from users claiming the software is the spawn of satan mixed with glowing reviews of how the software is "the best one". I guess I have some reading to do.

[SuperSparks]

I've heard nothing but glowing reports about XOSL, and you can't beat the price either

It's very easy to back up the WinXP boot files, though - they'll easily fit on a floppy.

[Ice9]

Thought I would post back on how things went for me, and they went surprisingly well!

I moved my old drive to the secondary IDE channel on my motherboard and installed the new drive on the primary channel (in fact, wrestling with all those ribbon cables was the most frustrating part of the whole process - I now have 4 IDE devices and 4 cables...).

I used the tools that came with the drive to format and partition it into two 30GB halves, and installed win ME on the first new partition. After that was all done, I could see my 3 drives from the new OS:

C: (new ME - partition 1, new drive)
D: (old ME, old drive)
E: (partition 2, new drive)

I installed some drivers, then installed BootMagic. BootMagic was a snap to configure, and here I am back on the old ME drive writing this.

The only issue I have come across is that from this old drive, I can't see the first partition of the new drive for some reason. Here is what this drive thinks:

C: (old ME, old drive)
D: (partition 2, new drive)

It's not a big deal though. I am really liking this dual boot thing, I should have done this a long time ago

[DVOM]

Ice9, that's because BootMagic totally hides that partition so you don't have 2 primary active partitions trying to boot. I suggest using BootMagic only from floppy because if it's loaded on a partition which for some reason won't boot, and it's set to boot to that partitiion, you won't be able to override the setting. Even with the boot disk.

After experiencing this little problem, the next time I installed it, I made the floppy (and two copies), then uninstalled it.