I've just bought a new PC with XP installed. For compatibility with some games I'd like to put the hard drive from my old PC (running ME) into this machine and then get the option of which drive to boot to. Can this be done and if so how? Thanks.

Yes. Two ways. The easiest is to put the ME drive on the IDE channel (not primary master) and boot into XP. Then install Bootmagic on the root of the C Drive and upon opening the utility in Windows, identify the ME disc as containing an OS and name it. Set one of them to your default and that's it. To do this, XP needs to be installed under FAT32. If it's not then put the ME drive on the primary master instead and install BM on ME. The alternative is to manually edit the boot.ini file to indlude a second primary partition and identify the other OS ourself.

An easy but time consuming method is to format the hardrive. Use the windows xp cd to boot from and create topartitions on your hardrive. Then reboot. Now install Windows Me or 98 etc.. Once this is installed, Install windows xp on the next partition. Windows xp now lets you choose on bootup which os to run! tip.. When installing programs do it both under me and xp but over each other. then they can be run form either os aslong as both drives are fat32 obviously ntfs wont work in me.

I recommend installing WinME first. If possible you can partition the hard drive (either with a third party software like BootMagic or just with the Windows XP CD rom when you are installing: format the hard drive and make two partitions if you don't have enough money to have two hard drives). But unlike my esteemed college who posted above -- I wouldn't recommend you use FAT32 for WinXP. Yes, you can run any operating system on FAT32... but why? NTFS is faster and more fault tolerant (harder to break!) It is a BIT slower to WRITE to NTFS because of the extra data written... but its faster to READ from and it's harder to crash/corrupt! But, in my experience the best thing about having a dual boot (especially for games) is that one system should be 'untouchable'. In this case I'd recommend you have WinXP be 'untouchable' by Windows ME.... and an easy way to do that is to have WinME formatted for FAT32 and WinXP formatted for NTFS. (Then you can have your friends, your girlfriend, your cousing and the monkeys from the zoo all playing games under Windows ME... and they can't break your WinXP set-up... 'cause they can't even SEE that harddrive!)

Darn......the first post said clearly that he already had TWO hard drives, one with XP and one with ME. Can't anyone address his original question...???????