changing boot drive

[roger]

I started with Windows 2000 system installed on one drive.
Installed a second drive (as a slave device on the same IDE controller)
Installed Windows Server 2003 on the second drive.

At boot time, I now get the choice to boot the previous or new OS,
which is what I wanted.

The problem is that the boot.ini file that contains these choices is
located on the old disk. Presumably, if that disk goes away, so would
my ability to boot the new OS on the second disk. Right?


So, what I want to do is
- create a similar boot.ini on the new disk

- Reverse the master/slave jumpers on the two disks. Presumably, if I do
this then the new disk will be used for booting instead of the old one.

Does that sound right?

So, can I just edit the boot.ini file directly?
More precisely - can I just copy c:\boot.ini to f:\boot.ini?
Or, after that copy is there some utility that you have to use to make sure
the boot.ini file is usable for booting? I have this nagging feeling that
there might be some utility or special magic required to write this file to
a specific disk address or some such like that (remembering my Sun days...)

Thanks for your help

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I started with Windows 2000 system installed on one drive.
Installed a second drive (as a slave device on the same IDE controller)
Installed Windows Server 2003 on the second drive.

At boot time, I now get the choice to boot the previous or new OS,
which is what I wanted.

The problem is that the boot.ini file that contains these choices is
located on the old disk. Presumably, if that disk goes away, so would
my ability to boot the new OS on the second disk. Right?


So, what I want to do is
- create a similar boot.ini on the new disk

- Reverse the master/slave jumpers on the two disks. Presumably, if I do
this then the new disk will be used for booting instead of the old one.

Does that sound right?

So, can I just edit the boot.ini file directly?
More precisely - can I just copy c:\boot.ini to f:\boot.ini?
Or, after that copy is there some utility that you have to use to make sure
the boot.ini file is usable for booting? I have this nagging feeling that
there might be some utility or special magic required to write this file to
a specific disk address or some such like that (remembering my Sun days...)

Thanks for your help

Your problem is not really the file "boot.ini" - it's the drive letters.
By deciding to use the native Windows boot manager, you created
some dependencies. Win2000 is installed on drive C: and must
always run on drive C:. Win2003 is installed on drive D: and must
always run on drive D:. If you remove the old disk then the Win2003
drive letter will become C:, which makes for a very unhappy Win2003
installation.

In other words: You must keep drive C: in place. To avoid this
trap in future, consider using a proper boot loader, e.g. XOSL.
It gives you complete separation between OSs, and it's free.