Alex Schugman said:
i downloaded BootIt... the pack didnt even have a setup file... is it
something for expert users?
BING is wonderful - but it costs money. You can do what you
want without BING, but you need a cloning utility that can clone
single partitions (which Disk Director can do) - or at least image a
single partition and then restore it in a new location (which True Image
can do). Instead of BING, you can use XP's own ntldr and boot.ini
files to present the mulit-boot menu and to load XP. And instead of
BING for partition management, you can use Gparted, a Linux-based
partition manager that has a GUI, making it OS-agnostic to the user.
You can download Gparted as an .iso file for burning a live CD, or as
a .zip file for making a live USB stick. (When starting up Gparted,
I find that I can take all the defaults, except that I must use "1" to
indicate a moderately knowledgeable user, and to NOT let it
automatically set the graphic card type, but to accept the default that
is subsequently presented.)
Using the cloning utility, clone the 1st XP installation to an
unallocated
area of the appropriate size, letting the cloner create the partition for
you. (Many cloners, including Casper, let you clone to a partition of
larger or smaller size - all that is required is that the OS fit in it.)
You
may also tell the cloner to make a partition of the same size as the
source partition. When that is done, check with Gparted to assure
that the source partition remains "active" - Gparted's "Manage Flags"
function will call that flag "boot". With the source XP running, run
"msconfig" from the command prompt. Click on the "BOOT.INI" tab.
Then click the button labeled "Check all boot paths". This will set up
the multi-boot menu in the boot.ini file of the source XP for you. Then
open boot.ini (at C:\boot.ini) using Notepad, and to make the menu
mean something at boot time, in the two entries under "[operating
systems]"
change the strings between the quote characters so that they indicate
to you which copy of XP they point to. Then copy the two entries to
the boot.ini file of the clone XP, overwriting the single entry that is
already there. That will set up the multi-boot menu in the clone SP.
And to indicate to you which copy of XP is running, create a folder
on the SOURCE XP's Desktop with the name like "Source XP".
(You could do this in the clone XP as well, but although it will appear
in the Desktop folder, it might not appear *on* the Desktop.)
Then, with Gparted, set the "boot" flag in the clone's partition, and
set
the "hide" flag in the source XP's partition. (This will prevent the
clone
from seeing its "parent" OS when it starts up for the first time and thus
from becoming confused about who it is.) Then restart, and the clone's
copy of the boot.ini menu will be displayed. Choose the clone's entry,
and the clone XP should boot up for its first-ever run. If the source XP
called its own partition "C:", the clone will call its own partition "C:",
but
as long as the partition does not refer to any other partitions in any of
its
shorcuts, there will be no problem with that. Now, both copies of XP
will have a multi-boot menu, and you can boot from either partition to
run either of the XPs.
Using Gparted again, unset the "hide" flag in the source partition.
If you want to boot from the clone's multi-boot menu, leave the clone's
partition "active". If you want to boot from the source XP's multi-boot
menu, set the source partition's "active" flag back to "boot".
Thereafter,
you can use one or the other XP's Disk Management utilitiy to set the
"active" flag, but whichever XP partition is selected by that flag will
have
a multi-boot menu from which you can select either XP to run.
*TimDaniels*
