Operating Systems - choice - simultaneous or alternative

[sunandoghosh]

Operating Systems - choice - simultaneous or alternative

exploring different possibilities...!!!!!!!!

Respected Gurus and dear friends,

I always have used one HARD DISK with two partitions....running windows xp

Now i have also added one extra harddisk with again two partitions using windows server 2000...

Now problem is that currently what i do is depending on which one i want to use; i change BIOS settings at time of machine start by kepping press DEL so that it takes me to BIOS settings and there i choose one out of two hard disks...by modifying boot priority settings...

I was wondering is it possible to have (say) a screen which gives me option to choose any one from BOTH hard disk instead of changing BIOS settings everytime i start my machine....

Any idea / suggestion/ solution/ guide would be more than appreciated....

Thanks

Sunando

sunandoghosh at rediffmail dot com

 

[nweaver]

modify your boot.ini on your primary drive. Not sure with the windows boot loader what the line would be. Grub it would be hd(1,0) to get the second drive. I'm sure the windows guys who know the bootloader stuff will post here eventually. Or you can google for stuff on the bootloader.

 

[sunandoghosh]

anyone else would like to help plz..........................................

 

[sunandoghosh]

anyone else would like to help plz..........................................

 

[Navid]

I am assuming both operating systems are on NTFS.
If that is the case, you should be able to modify the boot.ini of the one on the active partition to include an option of booting to the other OS. Then, every time you boot, you will be given the choice.

This is just one example of many pages you can find that show you the boot.ini required for multibooting.

When in XP, click "Start" and "Control Panel". Click "System".
Select the "Advanced" tab. Click on "Settings" under "Startup and Recovery".
Click on "Edit" to edit the startup options file manually.
Copy the last line that starts with "multi" to the end of the file to represent the other hard drive. Change the disk number (and the partition number if necessary) on the line that you copied to point to the other hard drive.

Don't change anything else.
Reboot.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;289022

 

[futuristicmonkey]

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition"/fastdetect
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server" /fastdetect



That should be what you need. The /fastdetect disables the detection of serial and parallel devices at boot. Google for more options - but that should be it.

The "multi(x)" part refers to the controller. I'm assuming both disks are on the master IDE controller. The "disk(x)" part means which disk, on the controller, starting with the first disk, disk(0). The "rdisk(x)" bit is used with scsi - and is always 0 with IDE controllers. The "partition(x)" refers to the partition, starting with partition(1).