Hi friends, i would like some advice on having 2 xp os on my PC. Currently I have a 300G drive1 and a 80G drive2. Xp on first 8G partition ntfs. I wanted to copy xp on another partition on either drive 1 or 2.If this is done, will they stay totally independent of each other.Will it work if one is ntfs and the other is fat32?. I had earlier bad experience when I used easycleaner to clean the registry of one and everything screw up - somehow the registry of both are linked! Thank you STAN

hi stan972, You may clone your system to another HDD theoretically but I'm not sure if it correlates with license policy... IMHO if you worry about your data safety the best way is to image your system partition to another drive or to CD/DVD. This can be done by almost any backup software. If you aren't in the know of backup you may study backup and restore software review and Backup FAQ on www.backupsoftreview.com. I'd also recommend choosing backup tool that will be allow creating bootable CD - if the system crashes you can boot from it and run your backup archive restoration. Personally I prefer True Image for that. It can create its own Rescue Bootable media.

What you are attempting is redundant. Windows has the system restore safety feature for situations like the one you had. You can also implement an incremental backup image, there are several tools out there that can help you automate such a setup. Lastly you can create multiple layered profiles on the same XP machine.

If you make two partitions you could load xp on both and run them from a choice at startup. There is no need for fat/ntfs choice. If you need to secure the partition you might try to hide it and unhide it as needed. There is no unix type of mount to keep the two xp's from limited read/write.