Win xp Dual boot help and advice needed!

[Timothy Daniels]

It's not clear what you mean by "does not follow your outline",
but since Disk Management peripheral order does not vary
with boot order - and boot.ini's syntax does follow the boot
order - don't rely on Disk Management for disk position in
your boot.ini entries. Use Disk Management just to see
details about the partitions within the disks, such as how
many partitions there are, how big are they, which one is
marked "active", etc. For the values of rdisk() in boot.ini, i.e.
the relative positions in the HD boot order, rely on what you
see in the BIOS.

BTW, in Disk Management, the term "(System)" means
"the partition where the boot files ntldr, boot.ini, ntdetect.com
are found", and "(Boot)" means "the partition where the
operating system resides". It sounds perverse, but it may
be that way for historical reasons.

*TimDaniels*

I am looking at my Disk management now and I see that the
diskare marked
C: Healthy (System) [is Disk 0 Master first disk in boot order]
D: Healthy (Active) [is Disk 1 Slave second disk in bios boot order ]
E: Healthy [Is Disk 2 Master not in bios boot order]
H: Healthy (Active) [Is External USB2 Hard disk not in bios boot order]

So this does not follow your outline.What is the explanation?

"> You may eventually wonder whether you could put more than
one clone OS on the new HD. The answer is yes, if there is
room. My WinXP system only needs 16GB, so I alot it 20GB.
That lets me fit up to 4 OSes on a 120GB hard drive. Windows
allows a max of 4 primary partitions, though, letting one act
as an extended partition. In 4 primary partitions, then, one can
put 4 self-bootable OSes. One can also boot an OS from an
extended partition using the boot.ini and ntldr in one of the
primary partitions, but I haven't experimented with more than
one OS in an extended partition.

With several OSes on a hard drive, the partition that does the
loading is the one marked "active". You can use Disk Manage-
ment to do the marking. If "Mark Partition Active" is grayed out,
that means that it's already active. Then the selected option in
that partition's boot.ini determines the partition to load the OS
from. *That's* where you have to stay awake to know which HD
and which partition's boot.ini you're using. It helps to put that info
in the comment portion of the menu options so they're displayed
for you when you make your selection.

*TimRDaniels*