Dual booting two independently installed instances of XP

[Chronus]

I have two separate drives with windows XP pro installed (one was actually
cloned from the other, shortly after initial installation, as a backup) and I
can boot from either drive, if the other drive is no powered. Drive 1 is
large enough to have a 2nd 30+GB primary partition, and I have copied
(cloned) the contents of the 2nd drive onto this partition and would like to
configure boot.ini so that the ntldr would give me a choice of booting off
partition I (for my development work), or partition II (where I do my
photoshop stuff.) Either case I would like to have the other partition be
mounted as, say, drive D, and remain accessible for shared files (I realize
that this would expose XP on the D drive to viruses or other risks.)

I am wondering if this can be done without hiding the alternate partition
and, if so, what should boot.ini look on each of the bootable partitions ?

I added an entry to boot.ini on the first partition to designate
rdisk(0)partition(2) as the alternate OS but when choosing this (2nd) option
during boot, I end up in a login loop, as if the OS/registry on the 2nd
partition is not self-consistent. Is this possibly due to the fact that the
2nd partition was previously mounted as a D drive
when the machine was booted off the 1st partition ? Or could there be a
complication with ntldr trying to figure out which partition is active,
independent of the entry in boot.ini ?

Would appreciate any suggestions on how to make this work !

 

[DL]

You do realise that two installs of winxp require two licences, and as such
you may have activation/download issues

 

[Andy]

I have two separate drives with windows XP pro installed (one was actually
cloned from the other, shortly after initial installation, as a backup) and I
can boot from either drive, if the other drive is no powered. Drive 1 is
large enough to have a 2nd 30+GB primary partition, and I have copied
(cloned) the contents of the 2nd drive onto this partition and would like to
configure boot.ini so that the ntldr would give me a choice of booting off
partition I (for my development work), or partition II (where I do my
photoshop stuff.) Either case I would like to have the other partition be
mounted as, say, drive D, and remain accessible for shared files (I realize
that this would expose XP on the D drive to viruses or other risks.)

I am wondering if this can be done without hiding the alternate partition
and, if so, what should boot.ini look on each of the bootable partitions ?

I added an entry to boot.ini on the first partition to designate
rdisk(0)partition(2) as the alternate OS but when choosing this (2nd) option
during boot, I end up in a login loop, as if the OS/registry on the 2nd
partition is not self-consistent. Is this possibly due to the fact that the
2nd partition was previously mounted as a D drive
when the machine was booted off the 1st partition ? Or could there be a
complication with ntldr trying to figure out which partition is active,
independent of the entry in boot.ini ?

Would appreciate any suggestions on how to make this work !

You have to modify the registry MountedDevices information for the
second XP installation. See

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have two separate drives with windows XP pro installed (one was actually
cloned from the other, shortly after initial installation, as a backup) and I
can boot from either drive, if the other drive is no powered. Drive 1 is
large enough to have a 2nd 30+GB primary partition, and I have copied
(cloned) the contents of the 2nd drive onto this partition and would like to
configure boot.ini so that the ntldr would give me a choice of booting off
partition I (for my development work), or partition II (where I do my
photoshop stuff.) Either case I would like to have the other partition be
mounted as, say, drive D, and remain accessible for shared files (I realize
that this would expose XP on the D drive to viruses or other risks.)

I am wondering if this can be done without hiding the alternate partition
and, if so, what should boot.ini look on each of the bootable partitions ?

I added an entry to boot.ini on the first partition to designate
rdisk(0)partition(2) as the alternate OS but when choosing this (2nd) option
during boot, I end up in a login loop, as if the OS/registry on the 2nd
partition is not self-consistent. Is this possibly due to the fact that the
2nd partition was previously mounted as a D drive
when the machine was booted off the 1st partition ? Or could there be a
complication with ntldr trying to figure out which partition is active,
independent of the entry in boot.ini ?

Would appreciate any suggestions on how to make this work !

First, ignore "Andy". He's just a disinformation troll.
Second, realize that the boot.ini file that controls which OS
gets booted must reside on the primary partition that is marked
"active". (Use Disk Management to check this.)
The entries that designate the two options will be listed
under "[operating systems]" in boot.ini . The first entry will be
what existed for mono-booting, and its path should match that
of the default path. In your system, partition 1 is probably marked
"active", so its boot.ini file will be used, and its default OS's path
should include rdisk(0) and partition(1). The second entry
should include rdisk(0) and partition(2). What comes after the
path between the quotes is just an arbitarary string of characters
that are displayed on the screen at boot time for you (the user)
to discern which OS is which. You should also set the timeout
value to something like "10" to give you 10 seconds to decide
which OS to boot before the default OS is booted. Assuming
that this all exists, there should be no problem with the 2nd OS
calling its partition "D:". The running OS can call its own partition
whatever it likes, and it will refer to the other partitions by
whatever letter it likes. To remove all doubt about the correctness
of your boot.ini file in the active partition, would you post it
here for us?

*TimDaniels*

 

[Chronus]

Thanks much for the response and the URL to Dan Goodell's detailed and well
written explanation. And, alas, it looks like one cannot mount a partition
that contains a bootable windows (NT/2000/XP) under any drive letter other
than the one assigned to it when it is used to boot the system (usually C
even for casual browsing as a readonly volume to copy some files off it.

I find it incomprehensible to understand what the Windows
designers/architects had in mind in coming up with this scheme (given that
the notion of separating the mount point from the file system that is being
mounted was in common practice for at least 25 years before Windows entered
the scene) but it only takes a google search on multi-boot, cloning, or
system setup/repair to appreciate how much time and effort has been wasted on
this pathetic ``drive letter'' design.

 

[John John]

The fact that the computer is going into a reboot loop at the login
screen is an almost dead giveaway that the boot drive letter has been
changed. The drive letter onto which Windows is installed cannot be
changed, the drive letter assigned at the time of installation must be
kept, the only way to change the drive letter assignment is to reinstall
Windows. If the installation was cloned from an installation on drive
"C:\" it must keep and use the same drive letter. It is possible to
have each installation reside on a C:\ drive letter, that will in no way
affect the other installation, it will only make a difference if you
have common shortcuts or batch files that refer to drive letters.

The following article explains things a bit :

Unable to log on if the boot partition drive letter has changed
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/249321

Being that you have a dual installation and that you can boot one of the
installations you can simply use Regedit from the working installation
and edit the registry on the non-booting installation:

How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/

John

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Thanks much for the response and the URL to Dan Goodell's detailed
and well written explanation. And, alas, it looks like one cannot mount
a partition that contains a bootable windows (NT/2000/XP) under any
drive letter other than the one assigned to it when it is used to boot the
system (usually C even for casual browsing as a readonly volume to
copy some files off it.
[......]

I sometimes wonder whether Dan Goodell has tested the scenarios
which he describes. I clone my XP Pro system periodically to other
partitions on other physical hard drives in the system and they all call
their own partition "C:" when they are the running OS. The "parent"
OS is usually on partition 1, and the destination partition can be any of
4 Primary partitions or any of many logical disks in an Extended partition,
and when those OSes run, they not only call their own partition "C:",
they can access all of the other partitions with no problem. I don't see
how that can get screwed up in the way Goodell describes, because in
my PC it doesn't. Maybe its because he allocates and formats a partition
before cloning a system to it. I just let the cloning utility allocate the
space and copy everything, including the file formatting info, over to the
destination partition, and it all works out very well.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Chronus]

Thanks much for the additional information and the details from your setup
that is working as I also would have expected from a cleanly cloned copy of
the bootable "C:" drive on a separate drive or the 2nd (primary) partition,
on the same drive. Here is the boot.ini file that is identically present on
both partitions (on drive 0) containing WinXP-SP2, cloned from the same
source (have tried Norton ghost as well as DriveImage XML to cope/clone a
bootable "C:" drive to these partitions, having the copy operation also
designate the destination as "active"):

| [boot loader]
| timeout=10
| default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
| [operating systems]
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro SP2 --
DEFAULT, installed 10/28/07 " /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Pro SP2 -- Imaging
work, setup 11/09/07" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

What I would like to (hope to ?) see, is when I select the 2nd choice during
startup, the machine would boot off the 2nd partition, and would designate it
the "C:" drive.
It does not matter what it would call the first partition, but I want it to
be mounted and accessible.

BTW, I just tried an experiment to determine how if/how the drive letter
hysteresis is entering the picture by cloning the bootable "C:" partition of
disk1 onto disk2 (partition 1, an unmounted primary partition), and when I
attempt to boot the system, with both drives powered, but changing the
"controller order" in BIOS to select disk2 as the first boot drive, the
system boots "successfully", but it labels the boot drive "D:", and continues
to mount disk1/part1 as a "C:" drive, with seemingly non-trivial dependencies
on disk 1 for its operation (can't unmount the "C:" drive ?)
If I reboot this setup a _2nd time_, but power down disk1 before the system
starts to reboot, then I end up in the infamous login loop. (I do not
knowingly create symlinks or aliases from one drive/partition to another)

This problem does not occur if you immediately remove the source drive,
after cloning but before rebooting off the cloned disk. This option is, of
course, not available if the two bootable images are on different partitions
on the same drive (not sure if hiding the alternate partition would work but
that would defeat the purpose of having, at least read access to the other
partition.)

Thanks again !

Thanks much for the response and the URL to Dan Goodell's detailed
and well written explanation. And, alas, it looks like one cannot mount
a partition that contains a bootable windows (NT/2000/XP) under any
drive letter other than the one assigned to it when it is used to boot the
system (usually C even for casual browsing as a readonly volume to
copy some files off it.
[......]

I sometimes wonder whether Dan Goodell has tested the scenarios
which he describes. I clone my XP Pro system periodically to other
partitions on other physical hard drives in the system and they all call
their own partition "C:" when they are the running OS. The "parent"
OS is usually on partition 1, and the destination partition can be any of
4 Primary partitions or any of many logical disks in an Extended partition,
and when those OSes run, they not only call their own partition "C:",
they can access all of the other partitions with no problem. I don't see
how that can get screwed up in the way Goodell describes, because in
my PC it doesn't. Maybe its because he allocates and formats a partition
before cloning a system to it. I just let the cloning utility allocate the
space and copy everything, including the file formatting info, over to the
destination partition, and it all works out very well.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Chronus]

This would be great ! Thanks much for the URL on how to swap/change drive
letters in the registry.

How do you direct regedt32 to edit the registry entries on the other
partition/drive (not the current boot drive ?) Or do you need to do this
from the recovery console for the current active partition ?

 

[Timothy Daniels]

OK, you correctly know what you want to do, and your boot.ini
file is set up correctly to do it. Just as a data point, I've just
completed cloning an XP Pro OS from partition 1 on one hard
drive to unallocated space (resulting in a partition 3) on a 2nd hard
drive in my PC. When that clone on partition 3 on the 2nd hard
drive is run, it calls its own partition "C:".

There is one caveat in cloning which I thought would not be needed
in your scenario since you wrote that you cloned XP to another HD
and ran it in isolation from its "parent" OS before cloning it back to
a different partition on the 1st HD. That caveat is to isolate the clone
from its "parent" before starting up the clone for its 1st run. That you
said you did. Did you *really*? If you did, then I'm learning something
new if by cloning that clone onto a different partition on the original
HD produces the classic confusion which can occur between a clone
and its "parent" OS. In your case, this seems to be happening between
the 3rd generation clone and its "grandparent" when the 3rd generation
clone is started for its 1st time in the presence of its "grandparent" OS.
If this is really happening, you may have to resort to the kludge of
"hiding" the "grandparent's" partition when the 2nd generation clone
is started up. That can be done with various 3rd-party utilities such
as Partition Magic and BootItNG, although you have to be careful
to always have a bootable OS in the system to "unhide" a partition.

Since your 2nd generation clone seems to run OK on the 2nd HD,
just try cloning that clone again to partition 2 on the 1st HD, but instead
of providing it with a formatted partition to use, delete the 2nd partition
and let the cloning utility allocate the space for the 2nd partition and
use the formatting information in the OS being copied.
You might get lucky.

*TimDaniels*

Thanks much for the additional information and the details from your
setup that is working as I also would have expected from a cleanly
cloned copy of the bootable "C:" drive on a separate drive or the
2nd (primary) partition, on the same drive. Here is the boot.ini file
that is identically present on both partitions (on drive 0) containing
WinXP-SP2, cloned from the same source (have tried Norton ghost
as well as DriveImage XML to cope/clone a bootable "C:" drive to
these partitions, having the copy operation also designate the
destination as "active"):

| [boot loader]
| timeout=10
| default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
| [operating systems]
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP
Pro SP2 -- DEFAULT, installed 10/28/07 " /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP
Pro SP2 -- Imaging work, setup 11/09/07" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

What I would like to (hope to ?) see, is when I select the 2nd choice
during startup, the machine would boot off the 2nd partition, and would
designate it the "C:" drive.
It does not matter what it would call the first partition, but I want it to
be mounted and accessible.

BTW, I just tried an experiment to determine how if/how the drive letter
hysteresis is entering the picture by cloning the bootable "C:" partition of
disk1 onto disk2 (partition 1, an unmounted primary partition), and when
I attempt to boot the system, with both drives powered, but changing the
"controller order" in BIOS to select disk2 as the first boot drive, the
system boots "successfully", but it labels the boot drive "D:", and continues
to mount disk1/part1 as a "C:" drive, with seemingly non-trivial dependencies
on disk 1 for its operation (can't unmount the "C:" drive ?)
If I reboot this setup a _2nd time_, but power down disk1 before the
system starts to reboot, then I end up in the infamous login loop. (I do
not knowingly create symlinks or aliases from one drive/partition to another)

This problem does not occur if you immediately remove the source drive,
after cloning but before rebooting off the cloned disk. This option is, of
course, not available if the two bootable images are on different partitions
on the same drive (not sure if hiding the alternate partition would work but
that would defeat the purpose of having, at least read access to the other
partition.)

Thanks again !

Thanks much for the response and the URL to Dan Goodell's detailed
and well written explanation. And, alas, it looks like one cannot mount
a partition that contains a bootable windows (NT/2000/XP) under any
drive letter other than the one assigned to it when it is used to boot the
system (usually C even for casual browsing as a readonly volume to
copy some files off it.
[......]

I sometimes wonder whether Dan Goodell has tested the scenarios
which he describes. I clone my XP Pro system periodically to other
partitions on other physical hard drives in the system and they all call
their own partition "C:" when they are the running OS. The "parent"
OS is usually on partition 1, and the destination partition can be any of
4 Primary partitions or any of many logical disks in an Extended partition,
and when those OSes run, they not only call their own partition "C:",
they can access all of the other partitions with no problem. I don't see
how that can get screwed up in the way Goodell describes, because in
my PC it doesn't. Maybe its because he allocates and formats a partition
before cloning a system to it. I just let the cloning utility allocate the
space and copy everything, including the file formatting info, over to the
destination partition, and it all works out very well.

*TimDaniels*

 

[John John]

http://www.rwin.ch/xp-live/regedit.htm

Don't forget to unload the hive when you're done, the changes wont be
saved if you don't unload the hive.

John

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I had not thought about intentionally targetting an unallocated area
of the disk as the cloning target which would then become the new
2nd partition. This may well explain why I (think I) was more "lucky"
on a previous occasion !

Thanks much for the new tip and I hope this will work....

Please post your results. We're all still learning, too.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Chronus]

I had not thought about intentionally targetting an unallocated area
of the disk as the cloning target which would then become the new
2nd partition. This may well explain why I (think I) was more "lucky"
on a previous occasion !

Thanks much for the new tip and I hope this will work. It would make
switching back and forth a lost simpler !

OK, you correctly know what you want to do, and your boot.ini
file is set up correctly to do it. Just as a data point, I've just
completed cloning an XP Pro OS from partition 1 on one hard
drive to unallocated space (resulting in a partition 3) on a 2nd hard
drive in my PC. When that clone on partition 3 on the 2nd hard
drive is run, it calls its own partition "C:".

There is one caveat in cloning which I thought would not be needed
in your scenario since you wrote that you cloned XP to another HD
and ran it in isolation from its "parent" OS before cloning it back to
a different partition on the 1st HD. That caveat is to isolate the clone
from its "parent" before starting up the clone for its 1st run. That you
said you did. Did you *really*? If you did, then I'm learning something
new if by cloning that clone onto a different partition on the original
HD produces the classic confusion which can occur between a clone
and its "parent" OS. In your case, this seems to be happening between
the 3rd generation clone and its "grandparent" when the 3rd generation
clone is started for its 1st time in the presence of its "grandparent" OS.
If this is really happening, you may have to resort to the kludge of
"hiding" the "grandparent's" partition when the 2nd generation clone
is started up. That can be done with various 3rd-party utilities such
as Partition Magic and BootItNG, although you have to be careful
to always have a bootable OS in the system to "unhide" a partition.

Since your 2nd generation clone seems to run OK on the 2nd HD,
just try cloning that clone again to partition 2 on the 1st HD, but instead
of providing it with a formatted partition to use, delete the 2nd partition
and let the cloning utility allocate the space for the 2nd partition and
use the formatting information in the OS being copied.
You might get lucky.

*TimDaniels*

Thanks much for the additional information and the details from your
setup that is working as I also would have expected from a cleanly
cloned copy of the bootable "C:" drive on a separate drive or the
2nd (primary) partition, on the same drive. Here is the boot.ini file
that is identically present on both partitions (on drive 0) containing
WinXP-SP2, cloned from the same source (have tried Norton ghost
as well as DriveImage XML to cope/clone a bootable "C:" drive to
these partitions, having the copy operation also designate the
destination as "active"):

| [boot loader]
| timeout=10
| default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
| [operating systems]
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP
Pro SP2 -- DEFAULT, installed 10/28/07 " /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
| multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP
Pro SP2 -- Imaging work, setup 11/09/07" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

What I would like to (hope to ?) see, is when I select the 2nd choice
during startup, the machine would boot off the 2nd partition, and would
designate it the "C:" drive.
It does not matter what it would call the first partition, but I want it to
be mounted and accessible.

BTW, I just tried an experiment to determine how if/how the drive letter
hysteresis is entering the picture by cloning the bootable "C:" partition of
disk1 onto disk2 (partition 1, an unmounted primary partition), and when
I attempt to boot the system, with both drives powered, but changing the
"controller order" in BIOS to select disk2 as the first boot drive, the
system boots "successfully", but it labels the boot drive "D:", and continues
to mount disk1/part1 as a "C:" drive, with seemingly non-trivial dependencies
on disk 1 for its operation (can't unmount the "C:" drive ?)
If I reboot this setup a _2nd time_, but power down disk1 before the
system starts to reboot, then I end up in the infamous login loop. (I do
not knowingly create symlinks or aliases from one drive/partition to another)

This problem does not occur if you immediately remove the source drive,
after cloning but before rebooting off the cloned disk. This option is, of
course, not available if the two bootable images are on different partitions
on the same drive (not sure if hiding the alternate partition would work but
that would defeat the purpose of having, at least read access to the other
partition.)

Thanks again !

:
Thanks much for the response and the URL to Dan Goodell's detailed
and well written explanation. And, alas, it looks like one cannot mount
a partition that contains a bootable windows (NT/2000/XP) under any
drive letter other than the one assigned to it when it is used to boot the
system (usually C even for casual browsing as a readonly volume to
copy some files off it.
[......]


I sometimes wonder whether Dan Goodell has tested the scenarios
which he describes. I clone my XP Pro system periodically to other
partitions on other physical hard drives in the system and they all call
their own partition "C:" when they are the running OS. The "parent"
OS is usually on partition 1, and the destination partition can be any of
4 Primary partitions or any of many logical disks in an Extended partition,
and when those OSes run, they not only call their own partition "C:",
they can access all of the other partitions with no problem. I don't see
how that can get screwed up in the way Goodell describes, because in
my PC it doesn't. Maybe its because he allocates and formats a partition
before cloning a system to it. I just let the cloning utility allocate the
space and copy everything, including the file formatting info, over to the
destination partition, and it all works out very well.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Chronus]

Thanks for the pointer. This looks like a very helpful page
for those of us who are not comfortable with pulling the rug
from under our own feet by tweaking a live registry !