Dual boot Win2000/Win2000?

[KenJ]

Right now I can't afford to screw up my system with some beta software I recieved. So, I was wondering if I had another harddrive could I use it to set up a Win2000/Win2000 dual boot? One for development and the other for running beta stuff.

 

[Henry Kuo]

i am not sure if you can just install win2k on top of it, but system commander always work.

 

[CTweak]

<< Right now I can't afford to screw up my system with some beta software I recieved. So, I was wondering if I had another harddrive could I use it to set up a >>



You should be able to simply do another full, clean install of Win2K into another directory, such as \WINNT2 or \Whatever

I did this with NT4, I don't see why that would be a problem in Win2K.

You may need to edit the BOOT.INI file into the root directory of your boot drive, which might look like this ...

[boot loader]
timeout=4
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT=&quot;Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional&quot; /fastdetect
C:\=&quot;Windows 98&quot;

Add a new line (If the install doesn't do this for you) that reads ...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT2=&quot;Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional - Test install&quot; /fastdetect

Note the directory name change and change the description so that as the PC boots you can identify which is the test installation.

 

[Shudder]

It will work just fine and you don't need to manually edit anything.

I had Win2k for months but ran out of space for the SP1, so I had to reinstally Windows2k on a larger partition. But, I didn't want to do it all at once so I just left the old partition up for a while till I was completely done with the new one. I had Win98, Win2k, and Win2k as boot options.

Only thing I edited in the boot.ini was changed one of the &quot;Windows 2000 Professional&quot; lines to say (old) at the end of it.

 

[AndyHui]

You can create another installation of Win2K on a separate partition. Putting it on the same partition but in different directories will cause file conflicts in shared directories like Program Files.

Keep them on separate partitions, no problem.

 

[KenJ]

Great! Thanks 🙂