Double booting 2 OS in 1 computer 1

[ericablade]

Hi!
I am new to the forums. I have a desktop system that came with an original 20 GB HD that has Windows XP Home edition on it.

I recently installed a second 15 GB HD and used the same IDE cable to connect it. The XP and BIOS automatically detected it and formatted it to a FAT 32 system. Using the Disk Manager told me it is active and healthy with 14.93 GB free. I opened its properties and it showed lots of files apparently transferred to it upon installation. My PC sees it as the primary slave while the original 20GB hard drive is primary master.

My question: What are the steps I need to do so my computer double boots. I want to install my newly purchased XP Professional into this second hard drive and basically treat my PC as 2 separate computers.

I tried just loading the XP CD and went through steps by clicking on the Advanced installation option to allow me to choose which drive to load the OS but the installation wizard hit a snag and would not install. I had to remove the CD rom from the bay and use Go Back to my C drive an hour prior because the boot sequence still thinks the installation CD is still running.
I may have missed several steps so please help!!!

 

[ericablade]

One more thing, when I typed diskmgmt.msc in the Run and showed my setup, it shows that both Disc 0 (original C drive) and disc 1 (new E drive) have the blue bar indicating they are primary partition for both...but the original has NTFS and the new one has FAT32. How can one single primary partition have 2 kinds of files in them?

 

[TekTippy4U]

Win 2000 and XP recognize both Fat32 and NTFS file systems...I don't know enough about XP to help further....someone'll be along soon I'm sure.....
TT4U


Also try going to this forum
forum779
and submit your post....

 

[wolluf]

You must have selected to format the 15GB drive as FAT32 (the 2 disks are independent, so the filestore on one is immaterial to the other). You can go back into disk management and format it ntfs if you wish.

You don't say what snag you had installing XP Pro. You could just boot from the XP Pro install CD (change bios settings to boot from CD first) and start the install from there (rather than from within XP Home). Should be no problem - end up with dual boot - though you should be aware that both Home and Pro will be using the boot sector on the Home disk (so if you ever reformat XP Home disk, your XP Pro won't boot).

Alternatively, you could install XP Pro on 15GB disk, with Home disk disconnected. Then they'll be independent. Just have to edit the boot.ini file on the Home disk to add an entry for XP Pro (or run bootcfg from recovery console).
Boot.ini should look like this:-

[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 Home" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

 

[shaner66]

I used to work for Dell doing tech support over the phone, and this is what they always had us do, it never failed me before.

Wipe out everything on your new hard drive, files, programs, etc.

Disconnect your old HDD, connect the new one only, install XP Pro on new drive, shut down, connect both drives, boot up, shouldn't be a problem.