Dual Boot

scorpion12

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Jul 23, 2003
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My dad has a current install of Win ME. He wants to install XP on a new harddrive he's going to install... He doesn't want to upgrade, but he wants to check it out...

Can he dual boot ME and XP and not have a corrupted system from this? He doesn't want to lose anything...

He's planning on installing the new drive, formatting it, and installing XP to it... There's no reason it shouldn't work right?
 

Flinx

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Jun 8, 2001
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How about temporily disconnecting the drive with ME and temporarily making the drive to hold XP the master. Install, reconnect the other drive, then using a boot manager to load up the OS you want?

Should be no problem at all. One OS per disk will be very nice. But I think you will need a boot manager unless you want to keep playing the case and playing with cables.

Haven't played much with XP but I think you can force it to load on the 2nd disk if you don't want to disconnect the other drive while loading.

For a boot manager, I use PowerQuest's "Boot Magic" for my Windows machines.
Where my primary install was Linux I use "Grub" or whatever came with the distro (which are also capable of handling windows OS)

At one time, I had several OS's on one or more disks using "Boot Magic".
I'm sure I could do it with the tools I have (Power Quest's Partion Magic and Boot Magic). Anyway, wait for more people to comment, I'm sure u'll hear a lot more suggestions. And maybe a simpler way to do this.


The loving are the daring!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Flinx on 07/22/03 07:35 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 

Crashman

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Former Staff
Relax, I was dual booting 95 and XP on my server, it installs the boot loader automatically, you get two sets of windows files, and a choice at bootup which you want to use.

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jmecor

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I think any os of Microsoft will be able to dual boot safely, except of course for Windows 3.1 which is still 16-bit.

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