dual booting ME & W2K off separate drives

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

I've just installed ME on one hard drive and W2K Pro on another. My question
deals with drive letter configuations. Both Drives are Western Digitals.
Drive 1 is 13.6 G. Drive 2 is 80 G. Drive 2 was partitioned into a pair of
10G drives and one 60G drive (numbers rounded). When I boot up into the
different systems, here's what the computer sees. (a: is 3.5 drive for both)

Booting up in ME
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
F: CD-ROM
G: CD-DVD

Booting up in W2K Pro
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
G: CD-ROM
H: CD-DVD

Drive 2 with W2K Pro is NTFS. Drive 1 with W2K is FAT32. I know ME doesn't
recognize NTFS, so I understand why when the system is in ME mode it won't
see Drive 2.
My concern is having having different drive letters between the two OS. Only
C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters differ depending on
the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down the road? I'm still in the
"rebuilding" process for both drives (started over, reformatted drives,
installed ME first, installed W2K Pro second) and I've run into a few
glitches (browser freezes up trying to go to second page using Explorer 6)
but again, I haven't finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help or
advice would be greatly appreciated.
System:
A7V8X-X Motherboard
AMD 2200 Athlon CPU
1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)
Internet via Cable Modem

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

staggerlee228 wrote:

> My concern is having having different drive letters between the two OS. Only
> C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters differ depending on
> the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down the road? I'm still in the
> "rebuilding" process for both drives (started over, reformatted drives,
> installed ME first, installed W2K Pro second) and I've run into a few
> glitches (browser freezes up trying to go to second page using Explorer 6)
> but again, I haven't finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help or
> advice would be greatly appreciated.


It's unlikely that you'll have any problems caused by the CD and DVD
drives having different letters under each OS. If it concerns you,
however, simply re-assign them the same drive letters in each OS.

In Win2K, right-click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management,
right-click on each drive in-turn and select "Edit drive letter and
path." (It may be that WinMe also has a similar capability - I can't
say, as I've never seen a computer with WinMe installed, but Win95 and
Win95 both allowed this action.) Just remember that you cannot
re-assign a drive letter that is already in use.

For what it's worth, I always assign my CD/DVD drives letters far
enough down the alphabet to keep them from interfering with the
lettering of my often changing hard drive partitions and multi-boot
configurations. For instances, I usually label CD/DVD-ROM drives as R:
(for Read-Only), CDR/CDRWs as W: (for Writable), and Zip drives as Z:
(for the obvious). This lettering system is, of course, not necessary;
it's purely a matter of personal preference.



--

Bruce Chambers

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both at once. - RAH

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup (More info?)

"staggerlee228" <staggerlee228@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7CED7FD8-3616-434D-9D16-32439601EEC6@microsoft.com...
> I've just installed ME on one hard drive and W2K Pro on another. My
question
> deals with drive letter configuations. Both Drives are Western Digitals.
> Drive 1 is 13.6 G. Drive 2 is 80 G. Drive 2 was partitioned into a pair of
> 10G drives and one 60G drive (numbers rounded). When I boot up into the
> different systems, here's what the computer sees. (a: is 3.5 drive for
both)
>
> Booting up in ME
> C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
> D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
> E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
> F: CD-ROM
> G: CD-DVD
>
> Booting up in W2K Pro
> C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
> D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
> E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
> F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
> G: CD-ROM
> H: CD-DVD
>
> Drive 2 with W2K Pro is NTFS. Drive 1 with W2K is FAT32. I know ME doesn't
> recognize NTFS, so I understand why when the system is in ME mode it won't
> see Drive 2.
> My concern is having having different drive letters between the two OS.
Only
> C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters differ depending
on
> the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down the road? I'm still in the
> "rebuilding" process for both drives (started over, reformatted drives,
> installed ME first, installed W2K Pro second) and I've run into a few
> glitches (browser freezes up trying to go to second page using Explorer 6)
> but again, I haven't finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help
or
> advice would be greatly appreciated.
> System:
> A7V8X-X Motherboard
> AMD 2200 Athlon CPU
> 1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)
> Internet via Cable Modem

You won't have any problems as long as you load the WinME
apps into c:\Program Files and the Win2000 apps into d:\Program Files.

A much nicer way would have been to use a third-party boot
manager, e.g. xosl (free!). It would have allowed you to keep
the two OSs completely separate (i.e. each running on its
own drive C, with no interference at all between them. With
your current configuration, Win2000 must always run off drive D:,
even if you decide to ditch WinME at a later stage.