Need to Combine ME on 1 PC with XP on another PC

[OhMeOhMy]

My mother has moved in with her ME system. I have an XP (std edition)system. Unfortunately, we don't have room for both PCs (mine is new... hers ancient), and Mom isn't ready to go to XP. Besides, we both still want to have our "separate" stuff, if you catch my drift.

I know I can "dual boot", but can't seem to find in forum my particular setup.

If a default needs to be specified, I would like to have Mom's ME hard drive be the one.

Thanks so much for any and all help!
Jeannie

 

[wolluf]

If you mean you are going to take your mum's hard drive and install it as second drive in your machine, some notes:-

1. You'll need a third party boot manager to organise the dual boot, unless you reinstall XP with the ME drive in the machine. I'd recommend the one at

http://www.bootus.com,

free for personal use.

http://www.xosl.org

also has a free one, recommended by others on these forums. Either will let you define which is default.

2. The first time you boot into ME when its installed on your machine, it will reload all its hardware drivers (as your machine is different from your mum's). This process sometimes leaves the operating system unbootable (but you could still access the data from XP of course). What's often suggested to ease this is to boot drive in its own machine for last time, go into device manager and remove everything you can. Then when you boot in new machine there's no contention between old and new hardware - it should just load drivers for new (if ME doesn't have drivers for all devices on your XP machine, you may need to download them).

Hope this helps - please post back if you need more assistance.