I have a disk with XPPRO ( in English )
And ANOTHER disk with XP PRO in FRENCH,
All I want to be able to do is choose to startup from the other disk
when I restart.
i.e. if I have been working in XP (UK) I want to select the the DIsk
Restart and work from the XP(FRench) disk.
On my Mac I simply go to Control Panels,,, Startup-Disk and select
the disk I want to start up when I reboot.
Where is this in XP PRO?????
Hi Paul,
In the PC world, this is controlled by the computer hardware, not the
Operating System. Most systems will have an option in the BIOS to configure
and select the boot drive. Many machines also have a "Boot Menu" option - if
you hit a function key such as F8 during boot, you'll get a list of drives
and you can choose which one to boot from. Check the manual for your PC
hardware, to see if your machine provides this facility.
Apple build both the hardware and the Mac OS X operating system; the one
compnay has total control of the environment. So, they can have a convenient
facility inside the OS to control the boot drive. In the case of PCs
however, the various components are built by many different companies. There
are many different BIOS manufacturers, and no standard interface that
Windows can use to control this setting in each machine's firmware. There is
a slow move towards the so-called "Unified EFI" to replace the BIOS, which
will make this problem go away ... but that is probably 5 or more years
away, yet.
If your company has a Select or Volume Licensing agreement with Microsoft,
you can probably get a French MUI (Multilingual User Interface pack) to
install on top of your English XP. That way, you can flip between French and
English language Windows, without needing to reboot. For some reason,
Microsoft only released the MUIs to corporate customers, not retail
end-users. For more info, see:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Muifaq.mspx#MUIques4
Hope it helps,
(BTW the best newsgroup for XP questions is
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general ... this
microsoft.public.windows.vista.general is actually specific to Vista issues)
