Xp Dual Boot

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I have installed Xp pro on a partition which takes up half of my hard disk, which installs happily as Drive C. On installing a second copy onto the free space, as a second partition, this installs fine, but on selecting it from the boot option, the windows drive is drive D (with C being seen as the first installation). Is there any way that the drive letter assignment for the second installation can be swapped, so both installations see their windows folders as C: ?
 
No.

JohnT said:
I have installed Xp pro on a partition which takes up half of my hard
Click to expand...
disk, which installs happily as Drive C. On installing a second copy onto
the free space, as a second partition, this installs fine, but on selecting
it from the boot option, the windows drive is drive D (with C being seen as
the first installation). Is there any way that the drive letter assignment
for the second installation can be swapped, so both installations see their
windows folders as C: ?
 
JohnT said:
I have installed Xp pro on a partition which takes up half of
my hard disk, which installs happily as Drive C. On installing
a second copy onto the free space, as a second partition, this
installs fine, but on selecting it from the boot option, the
windows drive is drive D (with C being seen as the first
installation). Is there any way that the drive letter assignment
for the second installation can be swapped, so both
installations see their windows folders as C: ?
Click to expand...

Yes, if you use a third-party boot manager. Any run-of-the-mill third-party
boot manager will let multiple OS's exist as alternate 'C' partitions while
(optionally) hiding the non-booted partition so they can't see each other.
The boot manager included with XP cannot do that. Be aware that installing
a third-party boot manager will necessitate reinstalling your second OS
because once installed as 'D', you're stuck with 'D'.
 
Thanks Dan, clearly both of you are right, you cannot do it wit Xp alone. I have managed to do it using Partition Magic to hide the first installation before doing the second (as you suggested). A careful but logical sequence of hiding and unhiding, and moving drives gave me the result I wanted. No doubt a third party boot manager would have done the same, but I was trying to get the Xp multiple boot to handle it once set up. Thanks for your inpu
John
 
I've had 2 xp systems on separate partitions w/o third party boot managers.
just modified the xp boot loader file, but I don't remember the actual file
setup now.
these links might help-especially the first. its the boot loader one

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;289022

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306559

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315233

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305873


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JohnT said:
I have installed Xp pro on a partition which takes up half of my hard
Click to expand...
disk, which installs happily as Drive C. On installing a second copy onto
the free space, as a second partition, this installs fine, but on selecting
it from the boot option, the windows drive is drive D (with C being seen as
the first installation). Is there any way that the drive letter assignment
for the second installation can be swapped, so both installations see their
windows folders as C: ?
 
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