Question about dual boot setup

[vicequad]

Hello,

I was helping a friend get setup with 2 Win XP Pro SP2 installations, each on a separate hard drive on his computer. With previous dual boots I've gotten a menu to select the OS to load, but that did not happen. What's the simplest way to fix this, preferably not involving manually editing the Boot.ini file? I may have to do this over the phone. I did some Googling, but the apps I found were too complex.

As an alternative, I was hoping there's a way to he can push a key before Windows loads to choose the "First Boot Device" in the BIOS without having to go through all the steps of editing the BIOS. On my ASUS p5B, I push F8 to choose the boot device, but F8 does not work on my friends ECS (Northwood P4 era) motherboard. Are the other keys that might do the trick?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[sturm]

How were the installs setup?
If you installed it on one hard drive, removed that drive, and then installed xp on another drive that wont work.
Install xp on one drive. Once that is done, install xp on the other drive with the origional drive still in. This will give you the boot menu like you have seen.

 

[vicequad]

I didn't remove the original installation drive, but I did switch it from Master to Slave on the IDE cable before doing the second installation.

 

[edklite]

you should have done both drives as master

 

[vicequad]

you should have done both drives as master

I don't think the IDE cables were long enough to go between the CD drives at the top and the hard drives in the middle. But the slaved windows drive (the old installation) seems to be running as well as it was before (which isn't saying much) . Regardless, I just need an easy way to offer boot options on startup. I used something called BCD (I think) on Vista to easily setup options on my system, but it doesn't work with only XP.

 

[g-paw]

Did you check in the BIOS to see if the 2nd hdd is included in the boot sequence?

 

[vicequad]

Did you check in the BIOS to see if the 2nd hdd is included in the boot sequence?

Yes, they're both there. The workaround we're using at the moment is to go into the BIOS and change the "First Boot Device", save and exit. Not ideal obviously.

 

[g-paw]

Have you checked the Boot.ini in msconfig and make sure both drives are in there, the last or last 2 lines, the longest ones? Just had the opposite problem, wanted to get rid of this option at bootup and the solution was to delete one of these lines in the boot.ini

 

[vicequad]

IIRC, only one OS was listed in each boot.ini.

 

[g-paw]

Then that is likely your problem. I guess you could either add the 2nd Window to your boot.ini, if this is possible. Have no idea how you would do this but you good google it. The other thing would be to reinstall Windows but make sure you have both drives in the machine when you do. If you find out how to add it to your boot.ini would be interested in knowing how this is done