Dual Boot with XP going wrong

[Tim Z]

Hello . . . this is my first post at these forums. So I will first give a small explanation of my PC uses.

I am professional photographer who uses my main boot for general email and internet use, as well as intensive image processing with Photoshop CS3. I am also a musician who records my own music as well as other artists on a finely tweaked second XP boot for recording only (i.e. no internet, antivirus, updates, etc.).

I recently built a brand new PC with these components:

CPU = Intel E8400
Mobo = ASUS P5Q Pro ATX LGA775
RAM = Mushkin Ascent PC2-6400 4GB
Vid Card = BFG GeForce 9500GT 550MHZ 1GB

I have one Seagate 500 GB drive partitioned into two 50 gig partions and the remainder as a data drive. I have a second Samsung 1TB drive for my recording and image files. All files are backed up in triplicate to other external drives. I will soon be getting two more 1TB drives.

So I completed the PC build and installed XP and all of my software into the main boot C: All was setup and working perfectly, but when I tried to install the second boot to my second 50 gig partition D: the whole setup got destroyed. I could not boot into my C: XP and had no choice but to start all over from scratch (about 12 hours of work). I now have my C: boot all setup and working perfectly, but am afraid to start to second XP setup on D: for fear that the same will happen again.

I have done a dual XP boot four years ago, and it was working perfectly for the whole four years. I thought I did everything the same this time, but apparently not.

I noticed when I got to the screen in the XP install where you chopse the install drive, that it always reads my drive as 131,000 (or there abouts) megs of space for both C and D. I also believe that it is reading my 1TB Seagate drive as D, when I actually have another partition on the main drive as D. I also believe that when I pointed the install to go to D, and then hit format as NTFS, it reformatted the C drive and installed on the Samsung drive as D, when it was supposed to install on the D partition of the first drive.

So I am not stumped as to how to get this dual XP boot setup again, and hoping I can get some insight as to what I am doing wrong and how I can achieve this dual XP boot setup.

Sorry for the long winded explanation. I thought a bit of history might help. Please advise if more info is required?

Cheers
Tim

 

[pat mcgroin]

First of all disconnect any external drives until you get the first drive the way you want it.

The second thing I noticed was
"I have one Seagate 500 GB drive partitioned into two 50 gig partions and the remainder as a data drive. I have a second Samsung 1TB drive for my recording and image files"
and
"I also believe that it is reading my 1TB Seagate drive as D, when I actually have another partition on the main drive as D."
Im confused is the Samsung or the Seagate the other internal 1TB drive?

Are they IDE or SATA drives?
If Ide check to see if they are on the same controller channel and set the jumpers to master/slave accordingly.
Or better yet disconnet the second drive until the first one is setup and then set it up for data.

Another option would be to setup the two XP versions on seperate HDDs and use the BIOS option to decide which one to use for booting. Thus keeping your settings completely seperate from the other.

 

[Tim Z]

Thanks for the reply Pat.

They are both SATA2 drives (are there any 1 TB IDE drives?). The first install was done with only the one 500 GB drive and the CD-Rom connected.

Doing an install onto two separate drives is an option I knew of, but not one I really want to do, for two reasons. One, I do not want to have to boot into the BIOS everytime to select which boot I want to use; and two, it sacrifices a second drive for use as a "working" drive for files. Typically you do not want your working wave files on the same drive as the OS. I want three separate 1 TB drives for working and backup files.

Regardless, I think I may have discovered the the problem. When I boot to the XP disk from my current main XP boot, it says that Windows cannot be installed on this machine because the current installed version is newer than the one on the disk. I have SP3 in the machine, and my disk is pre SP1. I think for this dual installation to be accepted, I would have to install the second boot right away after the first and before I upgrade it to SP1.

Since I don't do nearly as much recording as I used to, I have installed Sequoia in my main boot for now. I'll use it that way for awhile, and if it doesn't cause me any troubles, then I may just leave it that way and forget having a dual boot setup.

Thanks again
Tim

 

[pat mcgroin]

Im not sure about the newer version theory due to your wanting to put in on 2 seperate partitions. If the install is aimed at the second partition it shouldnt complain about the first one.

One other option I just thought of would be to copy the cd to the second partition and start setup from there.
If I remember correctly you need the i386 folder