Two HD. Dual boot. Win 2000 and XP FAILED!

[Degenerate]

I got two hardrives. one with Win 2000 and the Other i just put on XP. At first couple of boots seems alright everything smooth until about the 4th time, XP crashed with something like cannot load... system32../software. .. every time the blue bar has finished scrolling at start up and about to go to the user menu.

I reinstalled. samething. Then. i disconnected the Hd with 2000 and wala.. It works.. WHy?

 

[MrGrim]

In order to achive a dual boot with WinXP and Win2K you need to install Win2K first on the PRIMARY HD (the one you boot off, it's the one with the BOOT.INI file) and then install WinXP on the second one.

 

[SUOrangeman]

That's not necessarily true, Grim.

Deg-

Were both drives connected when you installed both OSes? What partitions do you currently have?

For the record, I currently multi-boot Win2K Pro and WinXP Pro off of one hard drive, with another storage drive in the system. I also have four other OSes on the main drive.

-SUO

 

[Degenerate]

None of the HD's are Partitioned....

I am pretty sure that Win 2k is on primary cus i installed Xp later on the 2nd HD. Isnt it that what ever HD you put in first is the priamry?

 

[MrGrim]

When I installed Win2K after having installed WinXP on a DIFFERENT partition everything went really wrong.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I'm not at home, but here is my lone-drive partition scheme (from memory ):

3.0GB Primary FreeBSD
3.0GB Primary QNX
1.0GB Primary FAT32 C:
~32GB Extended
-50MB Logical ext2 Linux /boot
-1.0GB Logical BFS BeOS (won't install though )
-4.0GB Logical NTFS 5.1 WinXP
-4.0GB Logical NTFS 5.0 Win2K
-2.0GB Logical NTFS 5.0 Personal files
-2.0GB Logical FAT32 WinME
-16.0GB Logical FAT32 Games
-3.0GB Logical ReiserFS Linux /
-0.5GB Logical ReiserFS Linux /home
-100MB Logical Linux swap

I installed the OSes in the following order: FreeBSD, QNX, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, Linux, (Beos). I am using NT Loader for all my booting needs.

I was supposed to document my adventure and post it as an AT FAQ. Too bad I haven't polished this writing up yet.

Deg-

If both drives were connected when you installed BOTH OSes, I don't know why you are seeing the problems that you've reported. Even if you "disabled" one of the drives in BIOS, I would have expected 2K and XP to see it anyway. And both drives were connected during te XP install, NO BOOT LOADER should have been installed on the second (XP) drive. When you disconnect the Win2K drive, NOTHING SHOULD BOOT!

Grim-

What specific problems did you see?

-SUO

 

[MrGrim]

The ntldr and some other files were substituted by Win2K and when I tried to start WinXP it tried to load it like Win2k! Of course that didn't work ... I had to use the recovery console to recover the files. You didn't have any problems because you did WinME->Win2K->WinXP. You used backwards compatibility, whereas I wasstuck with an ntldr that didn't know what WinXP was.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Well, I'd almost agree with you ... to a point. Win2K = WinNT 5.0. WinXP = WinNT 5.1. If you loot at the c:\boot.ini, both OSes happily reside next to each other. In fact, the boot.ini tells NT loader what to load. I doubt that there was that much of a change between NT loaders to cause your problem (could be the reason, but I wouldn't bet on it).

If I get a spare hard drive for a few hours, I'll try the reverse (XP then 2K).

-SUO

 

[MrGrim]

I didn't say that there is a problem with having those two O/S. There is no problem at all if you install WinXP after Win2k, because WinXP's ntdlr supports every pprevious O/S. WinXP knows what Win2K is and how to load it, however the ntldr that comes with Win2K can't load WinXP. When you install Win2K after you've installed WinXP the WinXP ntldr is overwritten by the Win2k one.