Dual Boot OS

jambo231180 · 11 May 2006 at 21:21

I have win xp pro on my c drive and have recently install win 2k on my d drive as a backup os.

i have tried to edit the boot.ini file to be able to selct an os on starup but so far have been unable to get it to work. any help / advise would be great

Energize · 11 May 2006 at 22:09

I dont think dual boot using ata works unless its on 1 drive.

daven1986 · 11 May 2006 at 22:26

you can use a boot program like one from powerquest - bundled with partition magic. but i don't think you can do it with the windows xp booter, you can with the windows vista one but you don't want that do you!!!

daven

Messiah Khan · 11 May 2006 at 22:28

jambo231180 said:
I have win xp pro on my c drive and have recently install win 2k on my d drive as a backup os.

i have tried to edit the boot.ini file to be able to selct an os on starup but so far have been unable to get it to work. any help / advise would be great

Copy and paste what you have in the boot.ini, so we can check if its correct.

Sel · 12 May 2006 at 02:20

I have dual boot system and all I do is hold down a certain button when starting the PC and it gives me an option to boot from either drive.
This has been the case on my last two PC's, this is a MB option so no software is needed.

zom247 · 12 May 2006 at 07:52

Sorry to hijack this thread but I'm thinking of dual booting using XP Pro and XP64. I have all my XP64 drivers so that's no problem. However, which OS would I install first? Pro or 64?

FeFiDoh · 12 May 2006 at 09:47

System properties > advanced > Start up and recovery settings > Select time to display etc.. i use 5seconds

also make sure u have two lines in the "edit startup" file called boot.ini mine is like this as i have it on two hdd's also!

[boot loader]
timeout=5
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
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Media Center" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /sos

obviously change the names to match yours or what ever you want

jambo231180 · 14 May 2006 at 16:07

thanks for all the help managed to get it to work over 2 seperate drives using the boot.ini file. now running win xp 64 bit to see what its like and got win 2k as a backup. Only thing is i cant seem to find drivers for my pci ide expander card and xp64 aint seeing my sata drive.