Dual boot question

[Pheasant Plucker®]

Hi there,

I have been asked to install XP Home on a computer pre-installed with Win
ME.

I have replaced the single 128MB to 2 x 256MB for a total of 512MB and
replaced the old 20GB HDD with a 40GB drive - the CPU is a 1Gb Athlon.

I did advise to use the PC as a doorstop but they were adamant they wanted
XP Home on it...<sigh>

Anyway the SP2 install went well and I have taken the updates from Microsoft
and all seems fine - I am wishing now however that I had left the old 20GB
HDD in addition to the new 40GB to give the option to dual-boot.

I have installed many dual-boot systems from scratch when two HDD's were
installed by installing the newer OS last.

How do I approach installing the 20GB Win ME HDD in addition to the 40GB XP
Home?

I am guessing I will have to have an edited boot.ini and the loader file
somewhere - is there an easy way to do this now that I have already
installed XP on the 40GB HDD

 

[Jerry]

It would be much easier for you to remove the 40Gb drive and reinstall the
20, then boot with the ME safety boot floppy and reformat the the 40G drive,
boot into ME and then install XP on the 40 and let it perform the dual-boot
option. (And remember the ME install will not be able to 'read' the XP drive
if it is installed as NTFS; you will have to stick to FAT32.)

 

[Pheasant Plucker®]

Thanks for the quick reply Jerry,

I was hoping to maybe install the 20GB and possibly do a repair/reinstall of
XP - easiest way possible I guess...

I am using an OEM XP Home if that makes any difference...

Kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi there,

I have been asked to install XP Home on a computer pre-installed with Win
ME.

I have replaced the single 128MB to 2 x 256MB for a total of 512MB and
replaced the old 20GB HDD with a 40GB drive - the CPU is a 1Gb Athlon.

I did advise to use the PC as a doorstop but they were adamant they wanted
XP Home on it...<sigh>

Anyway the SP2 install went well and I have taken the updates from Microsoft
and all seems fine - I am wishing now however that I had left the old 20GB
HDD in addition to the new 40GB to give the option to dual-boot.

I have installed many dual-boot systems from scratch when two HDD's were
installed by installing the newer OS last.

How do I approach installing the 20GB Win ME HDD in addition to the 40GB XP
Home?

I am guessing I will have to have an edited boot.ini and the loader file
somewhere - is there an easy way to do this now that I have already
installed XP on the 40GB HDD

Please supply further details:
- Does WinME still exist on the 20 GB disk?
- How many partitions on the 40 GB disk?
- What type are these partitions - FAT32 or NTFS?

 

[Ron Sommer]

A free boot loader (XOSL) may be able to let you put the old drive back in
and choose which program to boot.

 

[Pheasant Plucker®]

Thanks for the replies guys...

The original 20GB still has WinME and all data intact - all I did was to
remove it as a working disc.

The new 40GB has one 40GB NTFS partition...

Thinking about it - could I not just install the 20GB as a slave, modify the
boot.ini on the 40GB to choose which drive to boot from?

I realise that if I booted from the 20GB WinME I would not be able to access
data on the 40GB XP drive but that would not be a problem - at least if I
booted into XP I would be able to access the data on the WinME 20GB drive...

It's just that there is nothing wrong with the 20GB Win ME drive, all the
original data is on there, documents, pictures, email etc.

In a way it would be a belt & braces job and it almost makes it failsafe -
if for some reason there is a problem with XP then it may be possible to
boot into Win ME if the loader and boot.ini are intact of course.

I would normally leave the original HDD in situ for the reasons above - I
did not in this case because there was no easy way to mount both drives
initially and I thought that having both drives on the same Primary IDE bus
would impact on performance?

Thanks & regards,
-=Glyn=-

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

See below.

Thanks for the replies guys...

The original 20GB still has WinME and all data intact - all I did was to
remove it as a working disc.
Good!

The new 40GB has one 40GB NTFS partition...

Thinking about it - could I not just install the 20GB as a slave, modify the
boot.ini on the 40GB to choose which drive to boot from?

No, you can't. WinME does not recognise NTFS partitions, hence it
will never execute the WinME boot files, regardless of your settings
in boot.ini.

I realise that if I booted from the 20GB WinME I would not be able to access
data on the 40GB XP drive but that would not be a problem - at least if I
booted into XP I would be able to access the data on the WinME 20GB drive...

It's just that there is nothing wrong with the 20GB Win ME drive, all the
original data is on there, documents, pictures, email etc.

In a way it would be a belt & braces job and it almost makes it failsafe -
if for some reason there is a problem with XP then it may be possible to
boot into Win ME if the loader and boot.ini are intact of course.

I would normally leave the original HDD in situ for the reasons above - I
did not in this case because there was no easy way to mount both drives
initially and I thought that having both drives on the same Primary IDE bus
would impact on performance?

Thanks & regards,
-=Glyn=-

As Ron Sommer suggested, XOSL is your answer. Here is what
you need to do:
1. Install the WinME disk as a slave disk.
2. Download a copy of XOSL. Unzip it into d:\temp (D: is your
WinME disk).
3. Boot the machine with a Win98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com).
4. Navigate to c:\temp. You will see XOSL here.
5. Run install.bat. When prompted, say that you wish to install XOSL
into your WinME partition. Do ***not allow it to be installed in
a dedicated partition***. If you do then you lose that partition.
6. Reboot.
7. Add WinXP to the XOSL boot menu.
8. Add WinME to the XOSL boot menu.
9. Tick the "Switch drives" box for the WinME boot.

That's it, your're done!

Note: XOSL does NOT modify the WinXP boot environment.
If you ever want to get rid of XOSL then you need to run just
one simple instruction.

 

[M]

Very easy to achieve with XOSL free from
http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/home.html
The great thing about this boot loader is that it will allow you to
selectively hide partitions so that any version of Windows can be booted
from the any primary partition on either hard drive. There are many other
similar boot loaders available, this is the one I use.