installing, and booting multiple W2K installations (on different partitions)

[Vyruz]

Hello again.
to clear up a few things, i'm a software tester (this should explain why i'm trying to accomplish the things beneath).

i need to test different versions of software, problem is, that these versions cannot be run next to eachother on the same operating system.

untill now what i did was, have multiple harddisks with each a windows 2000 installation on them, but they all had differnt versions installed of the software i was testing.
Then , according of what i needed to test, i would install the corresponding harddrive.

A much easier way, would be to have a windows 2000 style boot menu, allowing me to choose between different W2K installations.

I tried doing this, by cutting my disk up into 4 partitions, and then installing w2K onto each of them.
this however, causes one major problem:
only the first installation will have a C:\ drive as system drive, the others will have d:\,e:\,etc
This causes problems during testing, because the software will go looking on the c:\ drive for files, instead of the drive it's installed on.

any suggestions would be quite welcome, as i'm kinda stuck here.
My needs in this are:
-boot menu allowing me to choose which W2K installation i want to boot
-windows may not see the other drives, each installation should have c:\ as system drive in it's own partition


thanks a lot in advance

 

[Tsaico]

I had a similar situation, but what I did was buy four removable hard drive enclosures and just labeled the drive as to what os was in it. so when it came time to test in whatever environment, I just changed the sled and booted... Not quite what you wanted, but it gets the job done too. I got my sleds for about 15 bucks a peice at newegg.

 

[TGS]

Virtual machines?

 

[Vyruz]

Originally posted by: TGS
Virtual machines?

That's no solution
i need to test various hardware peripherals too, and tests won't be thrustworthy when using USB/serial port emulation...