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2 independant WinXP installations on laptop drive

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Brontoy

Technical User
Feb 1, 2005
11
US
Please excuse the "newbeness" of my questions.

I would like to set up two installations of WinXP as independently as possible. I am a musician and want to use one OS for audio applications and one OS for internet/Office applications.

My head is swimming regarding "true hid" , "extended INT13h", and "boot.ini".

I am sure this subject has been raised before on this forum, but I did not turn up any good searches. Would somebody be kind enough to suggest a method? Should I use, Partition Magic 8, Norton Ghost, or Boot-Us? Anything, from a point in the right direction, to a step-by-step instruction, would be really appreciated.

Background: I installed a dual boot system on my desktop just using the Win XP installation CD and it works smoothly. However, once when I corrupted my audio partition, I re-installed it from a ghosted image. The restored OS worked OK, but all my audio programs had to be re-authorized even though the hardware was exactly the same. I was told that if I can manage to install the two OS's completely seperately, I would be able to ghost the two partitions and then be able to restore the audio partition if needed. The audio applications would be restored intact and authorized as before.

I am trying to set up my laptop as safely as possible before I go on tour and I will NEED to have it working all the time.

Thanks in advance, Brontoy
 
Is the laptop hard drive large enough for two complete OS's?
 
Partition magic and the included boot magic will allow you to keep them completely separate except when you restore. Then you use the bootmagic emergency disk to separate them again.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
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