Dual Boot Between To Different Hard Drives - Both Pro
Jul 23, 2003
Is it possible to dual boot between to different hard drives both running Windows XP? I just bought a new hard drive and I want to install it on the same machine and have a drive just for me and my wife and the kids can have their own. They down load so much stuff and cause the system to boot and run so slow. I'm tired of restoring it just to find 2 weeks later it's like it was.
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 have a computer at home with two identical 160 GB WD SATAII drives in it and I want a copy of XP on each drive. The first drive (Which I have been using as my gaming computer) has already got XP installed and I want to keep it pretty much free of anything but games so it won't affect performance. On the second drive, I would like to install another copy of XP and use this drive for my common use and with the primary intent of using it for a HDTV capture device. I've researched it for a while and have almost only been able to find information concerning dual booting with IDE drives using a jumper switching device so you don't have to dismantle the computer every time you switch drives.
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
So I'm using my a8n-sli premium motherboard and have been just using 1 sata hard drive using Windows XP for about a year. I bought a second sata hard drive last week and installed Vista on it.I just can't figure out the correct boot.ini for this to work,I get an missing NTLD message, when I try to boot from Vista, but the XP one works with that configuration.I can boot off the Vista one fine if I set it in the bios boot order to come up before the XP hard drive, so the drive and the OS are fine
I have two hard drives with different speeds the primary is 7200 the slave 5400, but my computer sometimes will not boot first time in the morning. I have to close it down after my screen turns off to power save. Which is the best way round for the drives to be installed or could it possibly be something entirely different that is causing the problem please. I have no virus or malware on my computer and all automatic updates are applied on windows XP SP2.
I recently bought a new HDD because the old one appears ready to crash (clicking sound). My DVD-Rom is also dead, so I booted from the old hard drive & installed a fresh OS (Windows XP) on the new drive. However, I cannot boot from the new drive alone, because the 'system volume' is Drive C: (old drive) & 'boot volume' is Drive G: (new drive). How can I fix this? I don't mind reinstalling the OS, but I cannot boot from a CD & I don't know how long the old drive will last
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 was running windows on an IDE hard drive and bought a new SATA and installed a fresh copy of windows on it, now having a dual boot with the old installation on the IDE. I've been running on the SATA drive for a few months now and I want to remove the IDE drive from my system but when I disconnect it and reboot I get a message that tells me NTLDR is missing so I am assuming that the boot record is on the IDE drive. How can I make the SATA drive my main boot drive?
The Dell 8250 Pentium IV computer will not recognize the new master 160 GHZ or the origional, now slave, 40 GHZ, Hard drives. All the connections and jumpers are installed correctly. I tried a new motherboard and a new cable, both did not resolve this problem. Even ran a diagnostic program called "Tuff Test", running at boot up and the RAM and all other items checked OK, showing all working properly. The BIOS, now set to boot up correctly, off the proper drive, seems to recognize both removable drives and the floppy, but not the hard drives. When I received the computer it was password protected. after asking and waiting for a week, with no response, I therefore, in safe mode,entered the BIOS and chose for it to boot off of the CD Rw that I thought was the proper and shut the Hard Drive off. Here the CD RW was a slave and not the master. No luck in installing the OS. I bought a new 160 GHZ HD with the thought that I could load the OS, again no luck. I replaced the battery and tried again with no luck.
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'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 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
Currenlty got an issue where i have a user who wants to dual boot with Vista and XP using sata disks.The general rule of thumb when doing dualbooting is to install the oldest operating system first, and then gradually work your way up.The way it will be setup is as so Vista - Primary partition of the 1st disk XP - Primary partition of the 2nd disk.Now, The way i was thinking of doing it was to install XP first, then install Vista, And modify the boot.ini to find the entry for XP.Is there any difference in modification of the boot.ini file when using sata drives, and is there any difference when making mods in Vista (As i have only edited the boot.ini in XP)
I had to do an reformat on my PC. Before the reformat, my PC read both my external hard drives no problem. Then after the reformat, it only would read one. When I would restart with both connected, it wouldn't budge from the welcome screen. After I would unplug the "questionable" one, it would then allow me to log in as usual. I think it could be a driver issue but I'm not totally sure because it does read it after a little while. I changed the USB cable, so for now, it is holding. Can anybody figure out what it might be?
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 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 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 just installed a 320gb I had around in a spare PC. I was reading up on jumping everything and understood that I should set the main HD as master and the spare HD as slave on the primary IDE connector, then set my DVD drive as CS on the secondary.My problem is that the master and slave connectors on the ribbon cable aren't long enough to reach both drives.(only places the drives will fit) So I hooked everything up CS while I put the main HD on the primary IDE and then hooked the DVD and spare drive on the secondary IDE. Everything seems to work fine and I can see both drives and everything, but on bootup I have to go into the boot menu and pick the main HD to boot. Is it safe to run everything this way? And if so how do I fix the booting issue?
I have recently re-installed Windows xp and all is fine with that operating system, but the problem that I do have is.I have two hard drives but only one is showing up. I know it is still there somewhere, but how do I make it available to use?
I am having a small problem. I have an old server, a Compaq Proliant 1600. I have had it for about 2 years, and today I finally decided to work on it. I added some more RAM, and installed Windows XP. It has six 9.1 GB Hard Drives, but it only recognizes the one hard drive that the OS is on. That is the only drive that will show up when ever I go to My Computer. My question, how do I get the other 5 hard drives to show up?
I was wondering if there is any way to boot my new Windows XP computer off of an old Windows 98 Hard Drive without screwing anything up. What I am trying to do is access and run a program that was installed on the WIN 98 Hard Drive. The software was an expensive Patent Software and I no longer have the installation disk.Here is what I have already tried:1. Connected the WIN98 hard drive to my XP Computer and booted up. Computer started to boot into WIN98 but came back with some kind of memory error and shut down.2. Tried running the software from the WIN98 Drive in WINXP but came back with an error about missing DLL files.Someone mentioned running the drive as a virtual machine.