Parallel Installation of Windows XP Home on a second hard disk!

[tah]

Hello!
I have installed Windows XP Home on the one and single primary partition of
my first hard disk.
Now I want to make a parallel installation of Windows XP Home on my second
hard disk, which has two primary partitions, and I want to install this
parallel installation of Windows XP Home on one of these two partitions of
my second hard disk.

I have read that some say that Windows XP can only installed on the first
hard disk without an additonal boot manager, some do not .

Has anybody created a parallel installation of Windows XP Home on his second
(!!) harddisk without an addiitonal boot manager and uses the Windows XP
boot manager boot.ini to choose between the installations?

Thank you for an advice or a report about your experiences!

TAH

 

[john]

If you want to do a new install from scratch, not image the other over, the
simplest way is to unplug your original drive from the cable & plug the new
drive into that cable connector.

 

[DE]

Hello!
I have installed Windows XP Home on the one and single primary partition of
my first hard disk.
Now I want to make a parallel installation of Windows XP Home on my second
hard disk, which has two primary partitions, and I want to install this
parallel installation of Windows XP Home on one of these two partitions of
my second hard disk.

I have read that some say that Windows XP can only installed on the first
hard disk without an additonal boot manager, some do not .

Has anybody created a parallel installation of Windows XP Home on his second
(!!) harddisk without an addiitonal boot manager and uses the Windows XP
boot manager boot.ini to choose between the installations?

Thank you for an advice or a report about your experiences!

TAH

Many people have done it; it's not much different than doing a multi-boot
with W2K or NT4.

Just do the install as a new install, point it to the 2nd hard drive, and
it will build the right "BOOT.INI" file (on the first hard drive, so DO
NOT UNPLUG AND SWAP THE DRIVES!) to offer you a choice of the two installs
when you power-on. The only problem you'll have is that since both will
read the same (as both are for XP) you should edit C:\BOOT.INI when you're
all done, to change the text to let you know which is which.

What you usually can't do successfully is a parallel install on the SAME
disk, because when you patch something like IE, one version will have
compatible DLLs and the other won't, so the second may not work anymore.
To be blunt, this is because MS insists on wrapping the IE DLLs into the
OS so that the OS relies on certain compatible versions, instead of
keeping them separate from the OS.

You do not even remotely need a 3rd-party boot manager to do this
successfully; the OS does it for you.

 

[john]

I beg to differ.
I've done it that way many times, with both drives jumpered to CS on the end
connector of the separate cables & renaming the new one to XP-backup or
whatever.
When you plug the cables back again afterwards, XP automatically rebuilds
boot.ini - no need to edit it.