Dual Boot Woes Boot.ini Fresh Install
Sep 6, 2006
I just upgraded my system a couple days ago and have been having several issues. First, Vista wouldn't recognize my onboard sound and LAN from a fresh install No available drivers, go figure. So, I had to install two copies of Win XP SP2, and then upgrade one of them to Vista. A pain, but the only way I could get everything to work properly.
I got everything where I wanted it, life is good. Then I'm booting into Win XP and I have two identically named Win XP OS's in the bootup screen. So as not to confuse my wife, I went into the Startup and Recovery options menu (Again this is in XP) and deleted, what I thought, was the XP I used as an upgrade to Vista. Turns out I got the wrong one. Now I can't boot to XP, but Vista is working fine. Basically, when I choose "Earlier Versions of Windows" I get HD activity for a moment, but then everything seems to halt. No responce from the keyboard, so I have to do a Hard Re-Boot.
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May 21, 2010
I have done some searching and it seems that other people who have had this problem, have been installing ubuntu. I havn't managed to come to a solution. I installed XP(1) onto drive 1 , then reorganised all of my partitions to be in the correct order with the correct labels (I have been having a nightmare with volumue labels being incorrect!). Anyways got all the partitions exactly how I want them using partition manager (i.e XP(1) on C: with the intention to install XP(2) on D. Rebooted machine, pressed a key to boot from CD, it says 'setup is inspecting your current configuration' and then the screen stays black (I have to reset the machine). I turned off the computer and dissconnected drive 2 (int.) and drive 3 (ext.). Problem still exists.
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May 21, 2010
I installed XP(1) onto drive 1 , then reorganised all of my partitions to be in the correct order with the correct labels (I have been having a nightmare with volumue labels being incorrect!). Anyway got all the partitions exactly how I want them using partition manager (i.e XP(1) on C: with the intention to install XP(2) on D. Rebooted machine, pressed a key to boot from CD, it says 'setup is inspecting your current configuration' and then the screen stays black (I have to reset the machine). I turned off the computer and dissconnected drive 2 (int.) and drive 3 (ext.). Problem still exists. How do I boot to the blue setup screen for my second copy of XP?
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Jul 26, 2009
I get up this morning and turn it on, it seems to boot okay, but after the Windows XP logo and the little blue loading bar it hangs at a black screen until after about five straight minutes I get fed up and power down. I tried booting in safe mode and that worked fine a minute ago, but now I am trying safe mode again and it hangs at a file called Mup.sys and will not proceed with the boot.
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Apr 27, 2007
I have recently cloned a drive containing an old win 95 installation to a new PC- reason being i need to retain an old MS DOS database program (service records for my firm). I want to install XP home in dual boot mode so that I can run current software/internet on the same rig...I've done it with Me before no probs...can it be done with Win 95?Also on the same hard drive is another data partition; can I have dual boot with additional FAT32 data partition i.e 3 partitions, two fat 32, one NTFS one of the fat 32 is bootable?
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Dec 21, 2007
I was wondering if installing a dual boot of Windows XP was possible. I'm not talking of installing WinXP along with another different OS, but....2 WinXP on the same PC.
-WinXP 1 for games and games only,
-WinXP 2 for all the rest (internet, office, video, mp3 etc, etc...)
I mean I would like to keep the WinXP for games installation (WinXP 1) as clean as possible, with only the drivers necessary, disabling all the windows services and stuff not needed on a general windows installation. I guess that this would give me a system with more resources for games (ram I guess), less need to use the paging file, less defrags (even if I already keep the programs/games on different partitions of the OS) and so on..
Is this a completely stupid idea (please don't be too harsh), or is it feasible? Is there another workaround (would creating another account profile do the job so that I won't need to have two windows installation ---> but I guess that I can't do that for drivers and programs I already installed in "use for all profiles" mode)?
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Feb 24, 2007
I'm wiping my laptop HD and starting fresh. I want to install DOS and XP, and I've gotten a lot of tips through searching old posts, but I still have a few questions. There wasn't much out there for this particular combination.First, equipment. I've got a Toshiba Satellite M55 with a 75 GB HD. I'm installing HP Home. I have no floppy drive. I'm also using a 250 GB USB external hard drive for backups and such. Partitions: What size for each? I was thinking I'd have one for DOS, one for XP and applications, and one for data, although I'm planning to store most of my non-essential data on the external. Is it beneficial to also have a separate partition for the swap file? I read a recommendation in another thread for a 30 GB volume for XP/apps and a 2 GB volume for the swap file with the rest allocated for data, but I didn't find any recommendations for MS-DOS volume size.
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Sep 2, 2008
A week ago I had some malware crap going on and was going to reinstall windows. The windows XP setup crashed partway through (was having some hardware malfunctions too so the comp crashed). I fired windows back up and found Malwarebytes. Ran it and it got rid of the malware and I was back to functional windows with no issues.Now at startup, I have a dual boot selection between Windows XP (which works normal) and the windows XP setup. How do I get rid of the Windows XP setup option so that it loads into WinXP normal?
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Jul 26, 2005
Can anybody point me to the instructions about how to install XP Pro to a single Win98 hard drive - to make it dual boot, like Win 2k? I've been looking all around the internet and the only thing I've found is an XP dual boot on a 2nd hard drive.
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Jun 24, 2005
I Installed a 2nd HD and cloned my first HD to it as a backup and would like to be able to dual boot. This is XP Pro. I would like to know what numbers to use in multi, disk, and rdisk.
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Oct 24, 2009
I accidentally deleted a partition and later found out that my system is dead....The only way I recover out of that is I reinstall Windows and then install grub again to recover the Linux partition. But I feel the delete partition is a very rapid process just taking seconds and in that I don't think files would be deleted, so I feel potentially I can recover the deleted partitions including the boot partition. But I don't know how to do it. Also now when the boot partition is deleted and the system is not booting up what should be done to recover the system and data?
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Mar 8, 2006
I have a dual boot system (2 hard drives) booting Suse and XP and boot up through Suse's built in boot manager which gives me the option of booting to Windows or Linux. But since I barely ever use Linux I want to delete it off the 2nd drive so I can use it for a storage drive, so I'm wondering how to replace the Windows Master Boot Record so I can just boot into my XP drive. I'm scared that once I delete/reformat the contents of the 2nd hard drive (I'll probably use Partition Magic to do this through my XP drive) that I won't be able to boot XP up anymore. So before I do anything I want to just be able to boot into XP and bypass the linux drive before I delete it to make sure everything is ok.
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Jan 1, 2008
I have a new laptop that came with Windows Vista. I have been trying to load it with Windows XP because Windows Vista didnt work. I am pretty sure a format and clean install will wreck my warranty, hence the dual boot. So far, I have been able to partition and install XP SP-2 to a partition. I've booted into XP fine but my Vista partition is not available. I think that the partition table or MBR has been corrupted.
So to repair this, what I did was boot up from the Vista recovery DVD and run the 'startup repair' option to reload the bootloader for Vista and thus, enable dual booting. When I rebooted I got a black screen saying 'Invalid Partition Table' or something to this effect. I tried repairing the MBR and so on and so forth from the console on the recovery DVD but this proved to be pretty much totally fruitless. So I went through and did an install of Windows XP once again, to my other drive partition I had created. So I am basically where I started.
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Nov 5, 2006
I have a dual boot environment with two Win XP installed on different disks, XP1 and XP2 . XP1 was installed first and contains the boot files (NTLDR, boot.ini...) and XP2 came second. Now, I would like to keep XP2 and get rid of XP1. How can i delete XP1 since it contains the boot files? if i delete XP1 i am afraid to not be able to boot on XP2.
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Sep 7, 2009
I have had this weird problem that seems random (i know computers arent really random but I cant figure out the cause). I have Win7 and WinXp in a dual boot working fine then after like a week of everything being fine my XP will not boot. I get to the Boot Manager and select XP and the screen just goes black and the system reboots back to the Boot Manager. I am having trouble finding the exact problem because I dont know win booting very well. I am assuming the MBR is fine because it gets to the Boot Manager fine. So I figure it is something with the WinXP partition. Win7 boots perfect. I have tried resetting up the boot with Easy BCD 2.0 beta (way better than 1.x) with no success.
This is not the first time this has happened, I end up having to either install XP fresh or do a repair install. I made a Acronis True Image backup and when everything was working then restored it with no success. I am getting really sick of this happening though because this is like the 6th time this has happened. The XP install is only used to game so it is bare minimum programs. I would appreciate any help in finding the route of the problem so that I can fix it instead of reinstalling the OS.
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Dec 9, 2005
I have a system which was initially set up a while ago as a dual boot, Win98SE/Win2K. I had a need for the Win98SE side of things then, but now that has gone but the Win98SE partition is the boot of course.I want to be able to do away with the Win98SE partition completely and ideally add the space to the Win2K one, maybe leave it as a clean NTFS partition if that makes things easier. This would mean that I would end up with a drive with a single boot partition holding Win2K. This of course is not a trivial process as the drive letter of the boot partition will need to change. (I do want that drive letter change incidentally).
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Dec 9, 2005
I had a Win 98 SE PC on a 20 GB drive (FAT32), and then I decided to ad an 80 GB and install Win XP. Since I wanted to maintain some Win 98 function compatibility, I opted for dual-boot, formatting my 80GB HD to NTFS and installing all of the Win XP OS into that drive. The Win 98 runs fine and is limited to the 20GB FAT32 HD, while the Win XP can see both drives but its files and programs are contained in the 80GB NTFS HD.
Now that I have deemed the Win 98 OS no longer necessary for this machine - I am trying to figure out how to make my machine boot from the XP HD (I plan to format the 20GB disk and use it for back-up storage
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Apr 3, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
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Jun 28, 2010
I have been trying to install Windows XP as a second OS as I already have Windows 7 Ultimate installed. Unfortunately, after I select a partition, format it, and reboot the system stalls on the screen after the BIOS that has something to do with a list of devices and such. After 10 or so seconds a few characters and letters go blank randomly on the page. I rebooted and selected my cd drive as the boot device and accidentally didn't press a button in time to boot and a bunch of highlighted numbers were thrown all over the screen and a random smiley face on one of the lines.
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Jan 12, 2009
I'm trying to dual boot 2 different installs of xp pro from 2 drives using the Windows boot loader. I've edited the boot.ini every possible way I can think of, but nothing works. I've done this plenty of times using a linux boot loader or dual booting from a single drive but I cant figure this out. I haven't been able to find any reference to this subject anywhere, but I think it would work. Anybody have a clue as to how to do this? I know I can use a different boot manager to accomplish this, I just wanted to make the Win boot.ini work. Or, does anybody know of a good boot manager if I cant make this work?
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Aug 29, 2009
I have dual booting on my PC with Vista home premium on a 500 Gb SATA disk and XP Pro on a 250Gb SATA, both internal. Vista no longer holds terrors for me and I'd like to get rid of XP and regain better use of the 250Gb HD. Can I just remove XP from the control panel in the XP boot or is it a lot more complicated?I don't really want to re format the XP drive as I'd have to transfer a lot of data and files
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Apr 24, 2005
I need to add another boot instruction to boot.ini to start xp on the d drive on the second disk - partition 1. This is what I already have
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="microsoft Windows XP Professional"
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Sep 7, 2006
I have a dual boot Win98, WinXP system. I reformated the win98 drive and started over. When I did this the computer only booted in to 98. So then I reloaded WinXP. Now it only boots into XP. Also, when I got into Control Panel>System>Advanced>Startup and Recovery, only one system is listed. It used to give me the choice. How do I fix this? Here is my old boot.ini file. I tried to find a new boot.ini file so I could rewrite it, but I couldn't.
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=C:
[operating systems]
C:="Microsoft Windows"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
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Jul 7, 2005
If someone has one physical drive with Windows 98 on C:windows and Windows XP on D:windows, what should their boot.ini file have in it so that they can chose which one to boot with?
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Sep 29, 2009
I'm running Windows XP and want to migrate to another hard drive. I used the excellent open source utility CloneZilla to clone my hard drive to the new drive, and used the equally excellent EASEUS Partition Master to resize the cloned partition to fill the new drive. Next I edited boot.ini on my original Windows to add the cloned drive as another boot option. After a bit of trial and error guessing the disk path for boot.ini I was able to dual boot into the original or the clone.
Now I want to boot off the new drive directly without dual booting off the original drive as I intend to wipe the old drive after I am satisfied that everything is working OK. But here's the catch: the original drive is SATA, while the new drive is IDE. So I can't simply swap the cables around and be done with it. So I configured the boot sequence in the bios to use "HDD-0" instead of "SCSI" (for some reason this old BIOS thinks SATA is SCSI) and restart. The system gets as far as detecting the boot source (floppy first, then CD-ROM) and then stops. No "operating system not found" or any other kind of error, just a blinking cursor and no activity.
I get exactly the same behavior using "HDD-1" to "HDD-3" as the boot drive in the bios. The bios detects the drive itself OK. I have also edited boot.ini on the new drive to point to the same location I used to add it to the dual boot menu on the original drive, but that didn't help. I also booted off the Windows installer, went into Recovery mode and ran Fixmbr and Fixboot with the original SATA drive unplugged and without specifying a device name.
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Jul 3, 2009
I'm running a home built PC with multiple hard drives. Award bios. I'm not sure if what I want to do is possible but here goes: I installed Win XP SP2 on my spiffy new hard drive, installed all updates and drivers, as well as virus software and what not. I then imaged this drive using XML. Point being if anything goes bad or buggy I can just restore the image. I also want to be able to use this image as source for a dual boot machine, giving me an OS that I mess up without harming my main install. I have currently restored the image to another hard drive, but cannot get it to run. I've messed with the boot.ini's, and only get errors. What am I missing here? Are there other steps I need to take to get this to work, or am stuck reinstalling windows for dual boot to take effect.
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Jul 23, 2005
I have Win XP home installed as OEM software on the C drive of my PC.
I also have this OS as a Norton Ghost file supplied with the PC as a
"Recovery CD".
I have installed a second hard drive designated "D"
This all works fine.
I wish to install Win 2000 (which I have on a Microsoft cd) on the second HD.
I would then hope at boot - up to be given the choice of which OS to load.
Can anyone tell me what is the simplest way to do this?
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Feb 1, 2008
I am running Windows XP and would really like to share the hard drive with another OS "Linux" and dual boot.
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Sep 7, 2005
I'm having this problem with windows xp pro fresh install onto sata HD. Pressed F6 and installed sata drivers for the mobo etc. Now i hasten to add that i have tried this 3 times now, set up runs smoothly windows installs however when i have finished windows will only boot up with the CD in the CDROM. Been into Bios and changed boot sequence but still if no CD it just gets to boot from cd in the boot up screen and> stops, put the disk in and windows boots straight up and away we go.
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Jun 7, 2008
I recently upgraded my laptop from XP Home to XP Pro. But, I absent-mindedly started to install by booting from the CD like I was doing a fresh install/reformat rather than doing it from inside the OS to do an upgrade. I caught myself, however and restarted without the CD and upgraded Windows from inside Windows. It worked, but now when I boot my computer, it gives me two options to choose from: "Windows XP Home Edition" or "Windows XP Professional Setup." When I pick the Home option, the computer boots up fine and goes to Windows.
However, when I go to Start>Control Panel>System, it shows that I have XP Pro even though I chose the XP Home option at boot. If I choose the XP Pro Setup option, it asks for the SP2 CD, even though the OS is bundled with SP2 on the same CD. I hit Enter, and it keeps asking for the SP2 CD even though the CD is in there. I tried to go to the Disk Management screen and delete the XP Pro Setup partition (which was only 1Gb), but that didn't work. So, I figured that boot.ini was still confused as to what to boot to.
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May 8, 2008
Right now I am running an AMD 6000+ processor on Vista 64 with 4 GB 6400 Ram and EVGA 8800 GT GPU. Runs real nice and games (including Crysis) run smooth. My rig is set up with 2 hard drives. Drive #1 has my Vista 64 OS and Applications. Drive #2 has all my games installed.
1. Now that XP SP3 is out, should I set up a dual boot for gaming?
2. Since my games are all on Drive #2, should I install XP Professional there or on Drive #1 where my Vista is?
3. Will the applications/games I installed under Vista work under XP or would I need to re-install them? The latest benchmarks I have seen for gaming Vista vs XP shows almost no benefit to XP anymore with the latest drivers. Will SP3 imporve XP enough to make it worth it?
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