Dual booting XP Home with Win Server 2k3

[Antillian]

Hi. I'm thinking of setting up a dual boot on my comp. I currently have XP Home on my main hdd. I have a secondary I normally use for backing up data. I want to install Win Server 2k3 on it. Here's what I was thinking of doing, because I've done it with 2k pro and server before.

Turning off my main hdd and installing server to the secondary.
Turning the main hdd back on.
Booting into the secondary and just make sure that both drives have an exact copy of the boot.ini.

so my question is, will this work the same way as with 2k pro and server?

[mbentley]

Originally posted by i_am_tux
Hi. I'm thinking of setting up a dual boot on my comp. I currently have XP Home on my main hdd. I have a secondary I normally use for backing up data. I want to install Win Server 2k3 on it. Here's what I was thinking of doing, because I've done it with 2k pro and server before.

Turning off my main hdd and installing server to the secondary.
Turning the main hdd back on.
Booting into the secondary and just make sure that both drives have an exact copy of the boot.ini.

so my question is, will this work the same way as with 2k pro and server?

why unhook your hard drive? there is no reason to do so. simply install win2k3 on the other partition. it will add an option to boot into win2k3 on the boot menu. simple as that... you will be fine as long as you install the older os first

[BUBBLE]

mbentley's option is 100% right. Your idea to copy the boot.ini files to both of the HDD is od to me and I don't think it'll work like that way. (correct me if i'm wrong in here) When in the installtion process entries will be added to the boot.ini file

[mbentley]

Originally posted by BUBBLE
mbentley's option is 100% right. Your idea to copy the boot.ini files to both of the HDD is od to me and I don't think it'll work like that way. (correct me if i'm wrong in here) When in the installtion process entries will be added to the boot.ini file

well, it would work, but it would be a complete pain. you would probably need to unhook whatever hard drive you didn't want to use to get into that os because both drives would probably be seen as drive c:\ and that could be bad, which is why you would need to unhook the drives to run each os. :)

much easier to let the boot loader take care of it.

[st3reotype]

only thing, when it has the option to boot to 2k3, the time to choose is like 1/16 of a second, is there any way to elongate the amount of time you have to choose? i usually have to get lucky and hit Pause/Break with perfect timing

[mbentley]

there sure is an easy way to fix it. just do this:
start > run > "notepad c:\boot.ini"
that will open up the bootloader config file. the second line should say "timeout=xx" where xx is a number value. that is the time in seconds that it displays the os selection screen. just change that to something like 20 or 30 and that will give you plenty of time to select the os of your choosing. also, if you want to make it so a different OS is the default, you can see where it says "default" in my boot loader which i copied below. simply copy the line from whichever OS you want to be the default and paste it after "default=". by the way, that S does belong on the line before, it just moves it for some weird reason...


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect



just ask any questions if you aren't sure because if you did happen to mess your boot loader up, it may not boot properly. if you would like, copy your boot.ini file up here and show us the changes so we can double check for ya to make sure that it is all good.

[Antillian]

ive tried dual booting with XP Pro and 2k Pro before. i was running xp pro and tried to install 2k pro on my other hdd. i think what happened was the drive letters got confused and i could only boot into 2k and ended up having to format both drives and start all over. im trying to avoid that possibility this time.

so if i boot from the 2k3 cd and tell it to install to my secondary there should be no problems?

by the way, thx for the replies, they're greatly appreciated.

[mbentley]

Originally posted by i_am_tux
ive tried dual booting with XP Pro and 2k Pro before. i was running xp pro and tried to install 2k pro on my other hdd. i think what happened was the drive letters got confused and i could only boot into 2k and ended up having to format both drives and start all over. im trying to avoid that possibility this time.

so if i boot from the 2k3 cd and tell it to install to my secondary there should be no problems?

by the way, thx for the replies, they're greatly appreciated.

that problem occured because you tried to install the older OS first. you need to install the operating systems oldest to newest in order for it to work properly.