hello everyone, i had been running 2 win 2003 server OS-s on the same computer, same 3-partitioned hdd til 3 weeks ago, no pbs at all, one OS on C:, the other on D: however, i then decided to replace one win 2003 with win XP, since several progs definitely required XP rather than 2003 server. so i formated C: and installed win xp PRO Corporate, leaving D: (with its win 2003 server on it) untouched. XP has since been running flawlessly, though big surprise - win 2003 on D: will not boot any longer, that is, i see the dual boot screen, but if i go for win 2003, it will try to boot up, but at the precise moment when the moving win2003 logo (that moving bar from left to right) should show up, the PC reboots, leaving me no option other than boot in win XP. i learnt somewhere that one should install 2 different win OS-s from old to new, i.e. win xp FIRST and win 2003 AFTER, while i did exactly the opposite. is that it? or am i missing something else here? any ideas greatly appreciarted

All the important boot files are on C: so when you redid it, you killed them and that's why 2003 on D: no longer boots. You can likely fix this by doing a "Repair" of 2003.

OK how this works is when you formatted the c: drive you formatted the S2003 SYSTEM PARTITION. To refresh, the boot partition in ms-speak is where the OS resides ie. winnt/windows folder. The system partition is where the master boot record points to and contains ntdetect, ntldr and boot.ini. In msdos days it was exactly the opposite. Boot files were the boot partition and where the OS was was system. Go figure. So when you formatted you erased the boot memory of W03. Now XP was the lone owner of the pc world. To get the 2003 master boot record back you run the 2003 recovery console command FIXMBR. This will unfortunately not fix your issue since you are still missing the 2003 versions of ntldr and ntdetect. Curt R is absolutely right in recommending running a 2003 repair. You do this by starting the 2003 install and when give the choice between new or repair, you will choose repair. After this you should be able to multiboot both OS's. If there is a issue it will be with the boot.ini. Either manuall edit it or use the recovery console Bootcfg utility to autocorrect the boot.ini. Best of luck!

Add the following line to c:\boot.ini & try to boot in Windows 2003.It assumes that win2k3 is installed on Partition 2 on your first harddrive. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2003 Server" /fastdetect If it doesn't work restart the windows 2003 installation, after first reboot remove the Windows 2003 Disk & edit boot.ini & add the above line, It will definately work. Regards, Jigan. Jigan.....

Thank you very much for all ur answers, folks. really appreciate that and i'll try those in hope they'll work :)