Dual boot with XP Home and XP Pro....?

[Vortec]

Hi,

With all reasons aside for now (mainly because it would be too much typing), if I were to create another small partition other than my main "C" partition on my 320 Gig drive and install XP Pro on the small partition then would that cause problems and conflicts with my main C partition? The small partition that XP pro would be going on would have the drive letter "G" since I already have "D, E and F" taken up by another physical hard drive, DVD-RAM drive and Removable Disk.

So basically my question is that if I make a small partition "G" on my 320 that has my main partition "C" on it, would I be able to boot normally with each one and not have any conflicts? Also, I assume I would have to download a boot loader. Which boot loader is the best to use? And, this is kind of an experiment process in that I don't know that I will even keep the G partition so if I were to reformat the "G" partition and add the space back to the "C" partition then how would I go about removing the no longer needed boot loader?

Hopefully this wasn't too confusing. It's much easier explaining this kind of thing in person though. lol Your advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[pat mcgroin]

You can do it.
A thing or two to clarify though.
Your drive order will be different that you imagine. Most likely your XP Pro install will take the place of your dvd drive and the dvd and removeable will move down one slot. This is assuming that D: is a data partition.
Generally drives other than HDD's will move down until a slot becomes available giving HDD's priority.

The boot loader will automatically fix itself when you put pro on it.
It may say win xp on both but you can go to msconfig and rename the second install to make it easier to differentiate.

Also do you have drive space left over to do this or are you going to need to resize the current partitions to create the extra one?
If resizing is needed I would suggest GParted to do the job.
It is a bootable Linux disk that you can download to do the job as windows wont allow this. It does a good job and is easy to use.
I have used it myself. It allows resize and creation of partitions without the need to reinstall windows.