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.
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.
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:
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:..............
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?
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
I will be formatting my drive now and I want to install XP and Vista so that I can choose which one to load at the start of booting up. How would I do this? Do I need to create two partitions, install both operating systems on the separate drives and then done? Or is there more to it? Which operating system should I install first, if there is any difference
I have two hard drives, both of them with Win 2000 Pro. The First has been the master in machine one from the start. The second HDD has been in machine twoand that machine has crashed so bad that it is not worth the time, energy or money to fix it. This second HDD has important data on it that is only accessable through older programs that are only on this drive. (It is a church membership data base program and a church financial record program) I have the added problem that no one in the office has a clue where the install disk are for these programs and they are not where they are suppose to be (this was before my time). I would like to place the second HDD in the first machine and set up a dual boot so the user can choose which drive to operate from. There is the added problem that the computers only have a restore disk that came from Dell and not a full Win 2000 Pro CD.
I have a computer in which I have an XP dual boot on 2 separate hard drives (160 & 120 GB).I have had this particular combination in working order since 4/07. A few days ago my 2nd drive (F) would not boot. I get only a blank, black screen and nothing else NO error messages or warnings. My C drive will boot normally, no problems.The drive is "seen" in BIOS, startup and in my computer on the C drive. The drive is there but the darned thing just will not boot. I have tried using "fixboot" & "fixmbr" to no avail!
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.
I have Windows XP home edition already installed on my system and I for some reasons I want to reinstall them on a different hard drive (I have 2 IDE drives). It is very important that my initial windows setup, the one I am running on now, will be working after the new installation too. Is that possible?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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"
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
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?
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.
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?
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home. I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do. I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
I have an old HD From a system that I got rid of. I want to put it into a friends system to see if I can retrieve the files off of it and put it onto my external HD. The hard drive was the boot disk and the computer I am installing it on has it's own boot disk. If I boot up with two boot disks will there be a problem? Is there anything I need to take into account before doing this? I am planning on installing the old HD onto an ATA cable that I unplugged from the DVD drive. The HD that is in this system is not on an ATA cable, I'm not sure what it is connected to, just a small plug with a blue cable going to the mother board.
