restoring a version of XP that is not currently running

[Guest]

After I updated XP, I could no longer boot the OS because of "hardware errors". These errors opccured very late in the boot process, just before the welcome to windows screen. I ran the recovery console. Both my disks (system and backup) were fine. I also played around with various BIOS settings and it looked like all of my hardware was working. I then reinstalled XP on my second disk (backup disk) and it booted just fine. I would like to restore my original system on my system disk. Unfortunate when I ran the system restore utility it only would reference the newly installed system. I have two questions:

1. Is there a way to point the restore utility to an OS that is not currently in use?
2. Can anyone think of a file that I could delete or change that would cuase me to "softly" crash to OS early in the boot sequence so that I could run a restore in safe mode?

thanks

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the pointer. When I tried an inplace upgrade it could not find teh OS on the drive. Note I had to install the drivers on a floppy. When I typed "r" and went into the recovery console, the console to could see both disks and it even asked me which os I wanted to use. When I typed "enter", the only OS it could find was on my backup disk. I then disconnected my backup disk and tried again. The cd could still not find the windows, but it did warn me that there was another OS on that partition and I should be wary of installing two OSes on a single partition. So I'm still stuck. Any ideas?