W2K : Dual install advantage.

[TomBilliodeaux]

I have dual installation of W2k. I call the second W2k2.
When i boot, i can select which to use.

ADVANTAGE: A driver file was corrupted in W2k and I could not boot into it. It gave me an error message telling me which file driver was not working and automatically rebooted, over and over again.
I simply booted into W2k2, copied the driver from WINNT directory and pasted it into W2k WINNT directory. Rebooted into W2k and everything was fine.

Much easier than going thru the hassle of emergency disk, searching for files on cd's etc.

If you have the room on your hd (1.7gb), its worth the second install. Perhaps you can just clone the drive to a newly created drive. W2k is not affected by the 8gb position on the Hd.

 

[jaywallen]

Hi, Tom.

I agree that a dual boot NT or W2K system (or at least a parallel NT/W2K install on the same partition but in a different directory) is a very good way to go, espeically on a standalone system. I use a 2 gig FAT partition as my drive C: but a large NTFS partition as my working W2K installation. It's nice to be able to defrag an inactive partition (or perform other maintenance on it) from the other boot. It's also nice to have a W2K install I can access with nothing more than a DOS boot diskette with some utilities on it in case things really get farkled, and it's nice to be able to access each partition from the other, as you suggested, for repair purposes. Haven't actually needed to do so yet, except in test case scenarios, but it's nice to know it's there.

Regards,
Jim

 

[TomBilliodeaux]

Thanks Jim for clarifing the different partitions.
I started this after 3 reinstalls when we first got W2k.
This was the first time in 6 months that i have had a problem and had to use this setup to rescue W2k. Was glad it was there.

 

[superbaby]

Agreed, I find myself booting into Win9x a lot to defrag/run scandisk on the Win2k drive, since I can never seem to run it from there (multiple processes). It's also great to fix any problems you may have with the OS if you can't boot into it.

 

[Floyd]

...or you can use WinInternals NTFS for Win98. I've fixed a few problems from Win98 in this fashion, and I don't have to waste any of my 115GB on another Win2k installation <sarcasm>

Best regards,
Floyd