Strict conformity with the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA)
would say that you need 2 WinXP licenses (i.e. 2 installation CDs).
But if you decide cheat, no one will catch you. The easiest way is
to make and activate one installation, then make and activate another
installation on another hard drive while the first hard drive is dis-
connected. If you have to call Microsoft to explain why you're
making a second installation from the same CD, tell the agent that
you accidentally re-formatted the first installation. (Your nose will
grow 1/4" longer.) Then, with both hard drives connected, you can
control which hard drive gets control at startup by entering the BIOS
(see your User Manual for details), and set one hard drive or the
other to have top priority in the Hard Drive Boot Order. The OS on
that hard drive will boot up, and the running OS will see the other
OS's partition as just a data partition. Each OS, WHEN IT IS
RUNNING, will call its own partition "C:" and the other OS's
partition "D:", but as long as you don't make any shortcuts which
reference the other partition, this is of no concern.
If you have access to cloning software, you can also just make one
installation and then clone it to the 2nd hard drive. This doesn't
require you to lie to anybody. This is best done with 2 hard drives
since the clone shouldn't be allowed to "see" its parent OS when
the clone is started up for the firs time. There are several cloning
utilities on the market, the best known being Ghost, True Image,
Casper, and BootItNG. Hard drive manufacturers also have cloning
utilities on their websites for free download that will work only with
hard drives of their own make. You can use the BIOS to select
which hard drive controls booting, or you can add an entry to the
boot.ini file of one of the partitions to enable dual-booting. But how
to do that requires an understanding of the boot.ini syntax and that
is a topic for another thread.
If you must work just with one hard drive, you can use make one
installation on one partition, and then after activating the 1st installation,
do a 2nd installation on another partition, and tell the installer to include
the 1st OS as a dual-boot option. (This also requires you to lie to the
MS agent.) At startup, the boot manager will present a menu on the
screen to let you choose one OS or the other to boot. When the 1st
OS runs, it will call its own partition "C:" and the other partition "D:",
and when the 2nd OS runs, it will call its own partition "D:" and the
1st OS's partition "C:". If you later wish to remove the 1st OS, it's
quite alright to let the 2nd OS continue to call its own partition "D:".
The downside to the above methods is that a virus that gets into one
OS's partition can also damage the other partition since both partitions
are visible to it. I *believe* that this problem does not exist if you use
virtual machine software that makes each OS think that it's running alone
in its own machine. The downside of virtual machines is that they're
slower than real machines, and they take more RAM. So if you're
running an elderly PC with 250MB of RAM, virtual machines may
be painfully slow. MS offers a freebie called "Virtual PC", and
VMWare offers "VM Workstation", also a freebie. Read up on
them before jumping in.
Another solution which sidesteps both problems is to use removeable
hard drives, sometimes called "mobile racks" or "drive caddies". These
take up a 5 1/2" expansion bay on your PC, and they allow you to
change the hard drive by sliding one out and sliding in another one before
startup. Kingwin makes several lines of "mobile racks", and I've been
using one for several years, and I'm happy with it. They also have extra
trays for your 2nd and 3rd and etc. hard drives. Kingwin makes them
for SATA as well as the older PATA hard drives. See:
http://kingwin.com/mobileracks.asp .
If you have SATA hard drives, Kingwin makes external enclosures for
those which have their own power supply modules and cooling fans:
These use eSATA cables to connect to the PC, so you make need an
adaptor on the back of your PC to connect to a SATA connector on
your PC's motherboard. Since you can boot from a SATA hard drive,
you can use these enclosures to enable switching between OSes. (This
is *unlike* external enclosures which use a USB connection to the
motherboard, and from which most motherboards cannot boot.)
Here is Kingwin's eSATA-only enclosure:
http://kingwin.com/product_pages/jt35ebk.asp
Here is a source of SATA/eSATA adaptors:
http://www.firewire-1394.com/external-sata-solutions.htm
Here are a couple sources of eSATA cables:
http://www.firewire-1394.com/sata-cables-shielded.htm
http://www.svc.com/esata-cable.html
So consider what you have and what hassles and/or expenses you're
willing to endure and whether you want to teach your daughter to lie,
and get back to us when you've made some decisions.
*TimDaniels*
