2 OS's on 2 HD's [Archive] - Overclockers Forums

saladfork

10-31-01, 01:19 PM

Sorry if this has been asked before but I'm short on time and my search didn't help me answer some of my questions.

A friend of mine has WinME on his C drive and now wants to put WinXP on his D drive. We are in the process of moving everything on his D drive over to the C drive so we can format it. Will he be able to run both XP and ME on seperate drives without any problems? Should we create a seperate partition for XP or can we just format his D drive and install as usual? Thanks for the help I've never done this before.

Ebola

10-31-01, 01:27 PM

not sure you can. linux and 2k can both do it because they have bootloaders. you probably can do it but you might need a boot disk to access win me. not positive here.

saladfork

10-31-01, 01:32 PM

Originally posted by Ebola
not sure you can. linux and 2k can both do it because they have bootloaders. you probably can do it but you might need a boot disk to access win me. not positive here.

We were thinking about just changing the boot sequence in bios. Will that solve the problem or no? Sorry if these are dumb questions.

sockmonkey

10-31-01, 04:07 PM

it should work. where is your cdrom drive though? if they are on separate drives you can treat them separately

saladfork

10-31-01, 05:46 PM

Originally posted by sockmonkey
it should work. where is your cdrom drive though? if they are on separate drives you can treat them separately

It's not my computer but i assume its on E or something. So what your saying is if WinME is on C drive and XP is on D drive he can just change the boot sequence in bios to boot from either one?

sockmonkey

10-31-01, 05:51 PM

...yes.:)

saladfork

10-31-01, 06:24 PM

Well after seeing his bios, there is no option to boot from say HDD-0 and HDD-1... it's just HDD. I think I read somewhere around here about a program called boot magic... should we get that?

Vryce

10-31-01, 06:50 PM

I don't know if partiton magic/boot magic will work well with XP, be careful there..

If you have no other way of backing stuff up, you might considder changing the jumpers on the drives, making the xp one master (since xp has a boot loader)

That or use a floppy to boot..which may be a bit of trouble

turd

11-01-01, 07:18 AM

i have used boot magic to do what u say with nt and linux and 95 and multiple drives. it will do what u say, boot from any partion/drive but with it and nt i foud problems when installing somr software, never had any trouble with boot magic itself it was easy to use and easy to remove

Ottoman

11-01-01, 09:50 AM

that's too bad, cuz it woulda worked.

I have 98se, on IDE-0

and XP on IDE-1

and I just switch boot sequence, and it names them C and D themselves...

if u don't need both drives at the same time u could always unplug one depending on the OS u wanted,
but dunno how often u wanna switch back and forth between them

SickBoy

11-01-01, 12:21 PM

Originally posted by saladfork

It's not my computer but i assume its on E or something. So what your saying is if WinME is on C drive and XP is on D drive he can just change the boot sequence in bios to boot from either one?

As long as C and D are 2 entirely seperate (physically) HDD's, yes. This is how I do it, I have 98/2K dual boot on a partitioned 30 GB HDD and XP on a 13 gig. You just change your boot order in your BIOS depending on what OS you want to run.

SickBoy