Dual boot two hard drives

[jonamartinez]

I have a windows xp system and I would like to add my windows 2000 pro hard drive as a second drive and then dual boot (both are ide). There are company programs on it from companies no longer in business. Any suggestions? Thanks for your time and info.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I doubt the [strike]XP[/strike] 2000 system that you are transferring will run well if at all. It will not have all the necessary drivers for your motherboard and hardware. A repair install may fix it. Make sure the other drive is disconnected if you do this - best to work with one drive at a time.

If you are able to get the transplanted drive to work, I'd just use your bios's boot menu to pick which drive to boot from. Worst case, if you don't have a boot menu, you could go directly into the bios and switch the first boot device to which ever drive you want to boot from. This will be easier than trying to get the boot loader to recognize two OS's.

 

[jonamartinez]

ok so you say i can not hok up two drives a use some boot up prgram to select the os to boot up? thanks

 

[Hawkeye22]

Wow, you totally misread what I said. I never said you can't hook up 2 drives. I said to make sure to only have the one drive connected when you do the repair install on it. Once it's working properly, then you can reconnect the other drive.

 

[jonamartinez]

ok sorry it is booting up ok to the xp and the other computer to 2000 pro we just wanted to get rid of one of the computers by making it dual boot.

 

[jonamartinez]

I was told to buy system commander and load it on the xp system. then when it boots up it will ask what os I want to boot into? Thanks sorry about the dual post I didn't know i did that.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I doubt the [strike]XP[/strike] 2000 system that you are transferring will run well if at all. It will not have all the necessary drivers for your motherboard and hardware. A repair install may fix it. Make sure the other drive is disconnected if you do this - best to work with one drive at a time.

I was told to buy system commander and load it on the xp system. then when it boots up it will ask what os I want to boot into? Thanks sorry about the dual post I didn't know i did that.

It won't be that simple for the reason I quoted above. You will need to reinstall windows 2000 from scratch unless you can get a repair install to work. It's been a long time since I used win2k. Does it even have a repair install option?

 

[jonamartinez]

ok thanks for all of your help.