Hi. If somebody can help me here I will greatly appreciate it. Microsoft articles did not help. I will try to be as clear as possible. 1. I want to dual boot to 2 separate hard drives windows 2000 pro and XP home edition. I already have windows XP home installed in one hard drive and this hard drive is setup as the master hard drive in the primary IDE. 2. I have another drive with windows 98 installed (will delete and install 2000 on it) and this hard drive is setup as slave in a secondary IDE. My goal is to keep my XP installation in that primary hard drive, install 2000 on the other hard drive which is setup as a slave in the secondary IDE, and have an option to dual boot to any of those hard drives at booting time without any problems. Could you experts please give me the steps to accomplish this goal? What I need to do? What drive should I have in which IDE, etc.? Looking forward to any of you guy's help. JM

hmmmmm.... you might want to do some google research and search for dual booting to find the info your looking for. it would take way to long to right out step by step instructions on this subject. especially when you want to delete another OS on your dual boot system. after youve read some and tried a little, post back with more questions. good luck AJ "ye of itchy azz hole, have stinky finger"

Hi and thank you for your response. For the last couple of days I have been researching google for this specific subject and could not find anything regarding booting XP and 2000 in 2 separate hard drives. I did find a ton of "booting xp and 2000 in a different partition" but I had to delete XP and install 2000 first and I don't want to mess with my XP already installed, especially when I have other hard drive. I don't need the steps to delete 98 from that hard drive. I know how to do it. 98 and XP weren't setup as dual boot in my computer. I just had 98 setup as a back up drive. Never had the option of choosing at startup 98, but only XP. Sometimes I disconnect the xp hard drive data channel, hook it up to 98 hard drive and change the pins in the 98 hard drive to set it up as a master. That is when I want to work in 98, but never had a configuration for dual booting with XP, if you know what I mean.

You can dual and even triple boot using win98, win2000, and winXP. See microsoft knowledge base article #306559. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306559&Product=winxp Keep a couple of things in mind. First, Win98 uses FAT32 file system. In order to see the files on the other partitions in the system, you will need to use FAT32 for all windows versions. Next, Win2000 and WinXP will not format a paartition larger than 30GB using the FAT32 file system. If you want to do this you may need to partition and/or configure your drives so that you will be able to accomplish this. Do not format partitions in win98 for use with win2k or XP. It is best to let them format on thier own. Disks larger than 64GB can't be partitioned using fdisk. You need fdisk64. Get it here: radified.com/files. That site is also an excellent source for info on how and why to partition disks. There is another utility there that you may need. It is called Delpart. This can delete any type of partition, including NTFS partitions. Be careful with it. Also take note that after executing a deletion you must save the work and then exit. Post back if you require further assistance.

2 easy ways. Put the 98 drive in machine on its own, and install 2k on it. Put XP drive back in machine as primary master, and jumper 2k drive as primary slave or secondary master. Boot machine - XP will load. Now you have a choice. 1. Download boot manager from www.boot-us.com (free for personal use). Install in XP, run it to set up dual boot menu (can save to floppy or mbr or partition. Recommend floppy to test, then mbr when happy). Job done. 2 (alternative). Edit the boot.ini file on XP's hard drive (in root of C:) so it looks like this:- [boot loader] timeout=1 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect Job done (will get choice on reboot).

You don't need an add-in boot-manager; and you can do it all without the need to manually edit the boot.ini (although that is one way) Set XP drive as Master to intended W2K drive (currently '98 drive) set as Slave; copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from XP drive's c: root to a floppy (keep it safe...); reformat (as fat32/ntfs - your choice) the Slaved drive via XP disk Admin tools; run W2K setup (CD boot or the 4 floppies etc.) and install to Slaved drive. Then you will discover you can boot only to W2K... Not to worry. Boot to W2K; access the floppy with ntldr/ntdetect copied from c: root of XP Primary (on Master drive) and copy those two files back to c: root of XP Primary (i.e. overwrite the W2K versions now there); reboot and you should now have access to both XP and W2K. W2K setup ovewrote the XP versions of ntldr/ntdetect with its own; and the W2K version do not work with XP. W2K arrived before its cousin XP so W2K doesn't know how to deal with it; thus XP cannot boot with W2K versions of those two files. All you do is to restore the XP versions - et voila... (XP versions of those two files will work NT/W2K/XP.) And there are other ways to resolve it too; but the above is the simplest on this occasion?

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you very much guys for all this information! You guys rock! I will try your suggestions now. Thanks again for your great support and your time. JM