Hello, I am trying the dual boot XP and w2k...I have two HDs one has XP, which is the newer hd faster and the other one has w2k pro on it...only the XP one is in my PC at present Will I be able to dual boot if I plonked them both into the computer and started it up, making sure the jumpers were primary master and slave. Would this work or would I need to format and reinstall everything ??? Thanks Shuttle SN41G2 AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 1GB 2700 RAM 160 Gig HD 8mg cache 80 Gig HD 2mg cache NVIDIA GFX5600

You have three options with both drives in the system. Option 1 If supported by your bios you can choose to boot disk1 or disk2. By booting disk1 you get xp, by booting disk2 you get w2k. It just means you have to go into the bios before you boot the OS Option 2 Buy a boot manager like System Commander [or many others] to get your boot setup between the drives Option 3 Assuming this W2K disk came from the same machine you can set it as master and the xp drive as slave. Boot the XP cd and go into install. When you get to the choice of new or repair choose repair. Repair the XP install on the 2nd drive. This will leave you with a multiboot between xp and w2k. Only shortcoming of this method is you will have to do all your MS updates again. Your apps and files/data are left alone.

A fourth option? Set XP drive as master to W2K drive (set as slave). Run the XP command: bootcfg /add It will (should) detect the W2K installation and add it to the XP boot.ini; thus it gives you the dual-boot. More on this routine at: http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBM/tip6100/rh6136.htm http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_bootcfg.mspx

Yep that will add it to the boot menu. But what about all of those registry entries that are point to c: which is now d: in Windows 2000? It would be time for the install repair of W2K. But doing that would put you in the older OS last and XP won't boot. Of course you were smart and copied off ntldr and ntdetect before the W2K repair and restored those XP versions back after the W2K repair. Ah the joys of multibooting :-)

Doesn't/shouldn't matter; W2K, XP, and NT (and W2K3?) refer to the registry during bootup and all paths will remain correct regardless of where a pre-installed NT/W2K/XP drive ends up (in a given system).