Rich Barry said:
Scott, the easy part is getting a dual boot set up. The hard part is
getting your old drive with WinXP Home recognized and
accepted by the new PC. The old drive has all the previous PC's device
drivers and will cause major compatability problems.
If I was doing it, I would move the important data from your old drive and
then format and do a clean install. Leave the new
drive connected so that when you perform the install, XP will see it and
include it in the boot.ini file which gives you choice at
startup of which XP Home you want to boot.
I see the potential for a problem here, maybe.
The old OS was installed as C:. And now he has new PC with another OS
installation, also installed as C:. Since the Windows boot loader can't
hide partitions, and AFAIK the boot loader must always be on whatever is
designated as C:, it would seem to me that it's highly likely that when he
attempted to boot the old OS, it would boot as D:! That's a problem; all
the old OS references are based on C:, not D:.
The whole problem stems from having both OS installations done
independently, thus the system never had a chance to assign the second OS
installation as D:, which would normally avoid conflicts.
Seems to me the only way this will work is to use a REAL boot manager which
can HIDE partitions. At least it's the safest approach. You can also have
a problem w/ HD ids. Each HD on your system is assigned a unique ID (0, 1,
2, etc.). Windows OSes can be very finicky, and will sometimes ONLY boot
from the HD w/ ID=0. When you have Windows located on multiple HDs, this
can be a problem since the second HD is assigned ID=1. Windows may refuse
to boot it! That's why good boot managers have an option to logically
"swap" these HD ids at boot time, thus keeping Windows happy.
Finally, your only hope of the old OS even working (assuming you get past
these boot issues) is w/ an XP repair install. That will provide an
opportunity for the XP installer to adjust the old XP installation to the
new hardware (e.g., new drivers). But it's never guranteed to work, just
depends on whether the changes are minimal enough to not cause other
"issues".
But at this point, I'd be far more concerned about the boot issues. My
suggestion is to use a good boot manager like BootIt NG (
http:/
www.bootitng.com ), even XOSL is you want a freebie, so you can hide
partitions, thus avoiding this whole problem w/ C: and D:, and fixup the HD
ids too. If you rely solely on the Windows boot loader, you may have a lot
of problems that are not easily solved. A good boot manager can help you
avoid them.
Jim
