I bought my wife a new computer which has Windows XP.Her disc drive is a 160 gig WD with latest format.I want to take her old drive out of her previous machine and reinstall it into her new machine.The old drive is a Maxtor 60 gig running Windows ME(Some of her old programs will only run under ME).What do I have to do so that she can run XP on new drive and Me on the old drive.

Guess it would be a matter of installing the old drive as a slave, then altering the boot.ini file. Never have done it. Back up your files. The second article tells how to add or remove an O.S. from the boot.ini file. The Purpose of the Boot.ini File in Windows XP HOW TO: Edit the Boot.ini File in Windows XP Print the articles to use as reference. -------------------- Probably other methods. Watch for help from others.

See dougknox.com, Rt side , "install win 2000 after xp is installed". Should work with ME as well. Please post back within 24 hours or I will delete the post from my follow up list. Thanks. It would be a courtesy if you would post back and let us know if the fix worked or not.

You will have to reinstall WinME. It will not work as it is! You will find some help on installing WinME after WinXP here: http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_9x.htm

Do you have an offical XP cd or is it a recovery disk? If it is the XP cd then you put the ME hard drive in as primary master and the XP hard drive in as slave and pop the XP cd in and do a repair install of XP. The result should give you a choice of operating systems to boot when you start up. Of an alternative way would be to put the ME hard drive in as slave and if you want to use it, go to bios and set it to boot to that hard drive first.

I wish to keep the Windows XP as my primary O/S and only access the ME disk when required.Won't XP configure startup to allow me to boot to existing "C" (XP) or boot to old drive with the ME??

ME was installed to a C: drive. It will not work as a D: drive. You will have to reinstall ME so windows will know it's on a D: drive.