2 HD's with different OSs

[nicki78]

hopefully someone can help since I don't know much about this kind of stuff. I recent got a new PC with winXP. what i want to do is take my HD out of my old PC and put it in the new one. my old HD had win2k on it. how can i set this up so that i can access both HDs at the same time. it's not necessary to be able to copy things between the two, just be able to access them. thanks!!

 

[wolluf]

If you just want to be able to read the 2k drive, just connect it as a slave to the XP one (there should be a spare connector on the IDE cable). makse sure the jumpers for both drives are set correctly (settings usually printed on the drive - or on website) - master and slave or both cable select. some drives have different master settings when a slave is present. Set the bios to auto detect it - and when you next boot XP, it should detect the drive, and allocate it a drive letter - and it will appear in explorer.

If you intend dual booting as well, you may have an issue with the 2k installation as you're totally changing the hardware for it - so all its drivers will be wrong. There are things you can do to help the transision go smoothly (sometimes windows will handle it all ok itself - couple of reboots all ok. Sometimes it just won't boot. Couple of helpful sites:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/motherboard/problems.htm

http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/article11.htm).

To get the option to boot 2k at all, you will need to edit the boot.ini file on the XP drive (in root of C to look like this:-

[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
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

(or run bootcfg from XP's recovery console -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654

HTH - post back if necessary.

 

[nicki78]

thanks wolluf, that worked great!