Dual operating systems

[Guest]

My three year old emachines had its motherboard burn up. Rather than try to
have it fixed I replaced it with a HP a6200n running Vista.

I removed the 350 GB EDI hard drive from my emachines and installed it in
the HP and the HP reads all the files - thank goodness. It tries to boot on
that EDI drive, but at boot time I can direct it to the SATA drive and it
will boot and come up in Vista normally.

I have a huge amount of work on that EDI drive and wish to continue using
some very fine XT software.

My questions are: 1. Can I use the EDI drive, containing a stand-alone XP
operating system, to boot the XP operating system without touching the SATA
drive containing the Vista and select the operating system at boot time? 2.
Can I legally use the XP disk that came with the emachines, since it is now
dead, to load the operating system on the EDI drive? Finally, 3. If 2 is
yes, is there too much difference between the emachines (Intel Celeron at 2.6
GHz) and my new AMD dual core HP PC for that disk to work or will I have to
buy a new XP operating system?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

1. Yes, but....
2. No, the license died with the emachine. OEM licenses are not
transferrable. To do (1) you'd need to purchase a new retail license. The
emachine's version is likely also BIOS-locked and will not install on other
hardware in any case.
3. Since (2) is no, you have this answer. You'd need to reinstall anyway due
to the major hardware differences.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[John Barnes]

If you are able to boot to the IDE drive, you will delete the restore points
and shadow copies on your Vista system. You would need to hide the Vista
drive from XP. Many times the OS is locked to the system installed on, so
you would be unable to run it on another machine.
I would expect that the upgrade to the new machine, even with the
motherboard burn up exception, is in violation of the EULA, but it never
hurts to go thru the activation process, talk to the operator and see what
happens. I would expect that it would be denied.
The CPU isn't as important as the other MOBO processes, specifically the
north and south bridge and I would certainly expect problems there. With a
new license and copy of XP, you may be able to do a repair install and have
it work. Do you have a copy of XP, or just a restore disk?

 

[Guest]

Hi Rick.

Thanks very much for the information. I was afraid that I'd have to buy a
new XP operating system, oh well. Seems a shame since my OEM disk is still
in its plastic wrap.

I should have mentioned that I am a genuine dinosaur and I know a whole lot
more about assembly language programming for the 8080 and the Z80, but I'm
pretty dumb when it comes to these operating systems. Actually, I'm real,
real, real dumb.

I should have written earlier that when I first power on the new HP system,
it TRIES to boot off the IDE drive (which really puzzled me at first). Of
course the boot is unsuccessful and then when it tries to reboot, I can press
Esc and get into the setup and direct the sequence to the other (SATA) drive.
After doing that, everything works great.

What I'm hoping is, by having operating systems on two entirely different
drives that only talk to each other after booting up, I can avoid wiping out
and having to reload any parts of the other operating system (does that make
any sense?). In other words, by having them stand-alone on two different
disks, one won't know of the other's existence and won't interact - is that
right?

If I replace the emachines XP system and load a new XP system on the IDE
drive, will it wipe out the hundreds of GB's of programs and data that are
already there?

And finally, can you suggest where can I buy an official XP disk that will
work with my new HP's motherboard and hardware?

Thanks again for your very helpful and rapid reply. I Really appreciate it.


John

PS Maybe it will grow on me, but so far I am somewhat less than thrilled
(hooboy!) with the Vista OS and very disappointed that it is so incompatible
with my XP programs and hardware.

 

[Guest]

Hi John:

Thanks very much for the reply.

Right now I am not able to boot from the IDE drive because the XP OS on it
was for the emachines and it crashes. By pressing Esc and then selecting the
SATA drive, it boots up in Vista just fine. After getting into Vista, I can
read all the data that is on the IDE drive - thank goodness!! By the way, it
sure is strange to me that the BIOS naturally selects the IDE drive over the
new SATA drive and you have to manually direct it at boot time.

As I mentioned in the other post, I am hoping by having two seperate drives,
I can have two seperate operating systems that do not interact with each
other. In other words, when it boots in XP, it won't even know there is a
Vista OS on the other drive and when I boot in Vista, it won't know there is
an XP OS on the IDE drive. That make sense?

Yes, I was afraid the emachines XP disk wouldn't work and now I'm thinking
that I shouldn't even try as it would be a waste of time. In the previous
post I asked Rick if he had any ideas where an official XP OS is available
and I wonder if you had any suggestions too. By the way, I have both a
restore and the entire OS disks. Both disks are in their original shrink
wrap and never had to be used before the motherboard burned up. Gee, the
motherboard burning up after three years of burn-in was the last thing I
expected.

As mentioned to Rick, I am a microcomputer dinosaur and I hope I am using
the terminology correctly.

Thanks,



John

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

I should have written earlier that when I first power on the new HP
system,
it TRIES to boot off the IDE drive (which really puzzled me at first). Of
course the boot is unsuccessful and then when it tries to reboot, I can
press
Esc and get into the setup and direct the sequence to the other (SATA)
drive.
After doing that, everything works great.

You might want to see if you can change the drive boot order in the system
BIOS to alleviate that.

What I'm hoping is, by having operating systems on two entirely different
drives that only talk to each other after booting up, I can avoid wiping
out
and having to reload any parts of the other operating system (does that
make
any sense?). In other words, by having them stand-alone on two different
disks, one won't know of the other's existence and won't interact - is
that
right?

You can certainly have two different operating systems on two different
drives, but in most cases they will "see" each other when loaded. In the
case of Vista and XP there are some issues when this occurs. To completely
hide them from each other requires the use of a third party boot manager
that can determine which volumes available on the system are loaded with
each operating system. My preference for this type of multi-boot system is
BootIT NG from terabyte.

If I replace the emachines XP system and load a new XP system on the IDE
drive, will it wipe out the hundreds of GB's of programs and data that are
already there?

Only if you choose to format it. You may be able to affect a repair of the
existing installation with a retail disk. Otherwise, you will likely have to
do a parallel installation where you will be able to regain access to data
files, but not the originally installed programs. They would need to be
reinstalled from their original installation media.

And finally, can you suggest where can I buy an official XP disk that will
work with my new HP's motherboard and hardware?

Any retail disk should do, and you might actually want to contact HP to see
if they offer a modified version of XP that has all the necessary drivers
for the hardware on this system. If you get a retail disk, just make sure
drivers are available for download from HP's support site, as not all the
needed ones may be in the retail disk.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[John Barnes]

As Rick pointed out, your BIOS will have a boot priority section where you
can change the order of HD priorities. There are two places in most BIOS's,
one for type priority (i.e. CD HD Floppy etc.) and another where you
prioritise the various HD's.
As to having two drives, it makes NO difference as to whether the restore
points and shadow copies are deleted when booting to XP. The drive must be
hidden or encrypted to avoid the problem.
Depends on what country you live in as to where to buy. The following are
recommended by MVP Charlie Russel I have used the middle three with no
problems.
NCIX.com (US and Canada)
Directron.com (US)
NewEgg.com
ZipZoomFly.com
planetamd64.com

 

[Paul Randall]

Hi
These newfangled computers are different from the ones we got in the old
days. If you go to
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?product=3548643&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&lang=en&cc=us,
you will see that HP only supports Vista on your computer model. That means
that you might be able to find drivers elsewhere that might allow WXP to
install and run, or maybe not. On my Compaq-Vista system, I was told that
the BIOS was optimized for Vista and WXP would not run properly.

If your current software and data are very important to you, perhaps you
should look into buying a used computer that might be compatible with the
WXP installed on your big hard drive. You might also consider using Norton
Ghost or Acronis True Image to clone your 350 GB hard drive to another drive
so that you can recover from things getting messed up during installation
and testing.

-Paul Randall

 

[Guest]

Hi Rick:

Thanks again for the very helpful information.

I was afraid the two OS' would interact, but I will look into the BootIT NG
you mentioned and I'll give HP a call and see if they have an OEM XP system
they will sell me (hopefully reasonably). I'm thinking now it might be
easier to just buy a motherboard, a new XP OS and get my old emachines
working again. I don't really know what I'm doing, Vista seems so hard to
manage and I am soooo afraid I'll wipe something out that will render my new
PC useless.

I have searched all over the place, but I can't see how to modify the boot
sequence. The old IDE drive is drive 0 and that's the one it tries to boot
off of. Nothing in the BIOS I've seen allows me to rearrange the sequence,
but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

I guess before I do anything I should make up and burn those OS disks for
Vista and somehow backup all those GB's of data from the old IDE disk.

Thanks again for all the help.




John