Multiple installs of XP on one drive?

I've got an old 20G hdd on which I want to mount 3 (or perhaps 4, depending on space) separate, but identical XPPro installations.

I own several copies of XPP, so there shouldn't be any legal issues (although I can't find anything online that says it's wrong to install multiple copies of XP on one drive; only that it's very naughty to install one copy on multiple drives)

My question: What's the best and easiest way to do this job? All I want to do is have 3 or 4 copies of XP on the one drive, with a little spare space left over after each install for a few added programs. I figure that a 20G drive should easily accommodate 3 installs.

Thanks

 

XXCLONE will be your easiest way. It's free for personal use. I have used it many time to do exactly what you intend. No activation issues ever. You don't need any additional copies or product ID's.

BTW, I presume you intend to have separate partitions for each system. It won't work properly otherwise.

Mine have always been on separate physical drives and I have no qualms about it.

 

Thanks SurferDude. Reliable as ever....

OK, I'll get XXClone and try it. I guess I should first partition the drive in a host system, with Partition Magic or similar?

Later: Just had a look at XXClone.

Um, maybe I didn't explain myself properly. I'm not trying to back up a system, I want to install XPP at least three times onto a single hard drive, so that I get the option to boot from 1,2 or 3. Each installation will differ slightly because of certain additional software I'll add, and will provide a different set of tools.

But that's all after the event and not of interest here. All I want to do is install XPP, three times onto one hard drive, onto 3 separate partitions.

Several web pages are telling me to use Ranish Partition Manager for this job, but that seems way too tricky for this old boy.

BTW, Acronis Migrate Easy is, IMHO, the best way to clone a systemed drive. Works a treat with either XP or Vista. Acronis True Image does the job pretty good, too.

 

Masonite, You were understood fully. XXCLONE can clone your existing system to any other partition (prior created) and render it bootable, even do the boot.ini editing for you and add the necessary system loader line, if you so choose. That will give you the boot selection menu when booting. Then when you select to boot the clone system, the drive letter designation will automatically switch with the source so that you are always booting a drive with the letter C:. That makes all the shortcuts and Registry paths work properly.

It can also clone your drive to another physical drive and render it bootable, even to the point of initializing it so that you can remove the original source drive and use the clone independantly.

XXCLONE has many features and can indeed just be used for backing a system up but creating a bootable clone partition is one of its more useful features for me. I clone my drive and use the clone for a "test dummy" system. I boot to the clone when I want to do something that carries an element of risk. If it whacks the clone system, I just re-clone my healthy system and it replaces the damaged system with another healthy copy. It's a very handy tool indeed!

The instructions on the site will make all that much clearer. You need not buy the full version to do all of these things. The free version does everything but make incremental updates to a clone copy. Most people can get along without that feature but I may yet pay for it someday, if only to reward the developer for a great product.

It's a pretty initutive process but you must use caution since anything with great power carries a degree of risk. Generally it's safe for anyone but a rank beginner. Two things to keep in mind, cloning wipes the Target drive completely before copying new data from the Source. All existing data will be lost. Secondly, it's extremely important to be sure you have the Source volume and the Target volume set properly. Setting that backwards can produce a disappointing result, such as wiping the data from the wrong drive and then copying an empty drive to replace it! Not a pretty thought. It gives you ample warning so if you make a misstep, you will have the opportunity to correct it before it does any harm.

Have no fear, give it a try and I'm sure you'll find it to be all that you need and more. I have never gone beyond one clone copy so you will be plowing new ground there. I may try that for a snowy day project someday.

 

UPDATE:

Since we are pretty well snowed in today, I decided to do an experiment. I re-partitioned my primary drive using Partition Manager. I created two new partitions. Then I cloned the system to each of them. Then I used the tools provided by XXCLONE to add the necessary bootloader lines to the boot.ini file. I now have three bootable XP partitions on the primary drive in addition to the clone that I had previously. That gives me four bootable XP systems. I think that should demonstrate that XXCLONE can fill your needs Masonite.

 

I use Acronis True Image and love it. I'm sure their other software is equally up to the task it is designed for Pete.

That said, my concern with the cloning of a drive is to have it end up being both stand-alone bootable and dual or multiple bootable without any wiring change or physically swapping drives. I'm not sure Acronis Easy migrate can do that. Then again, I haven't tried it. The automatic swapping of the drive letters is what makes that possible. Can Easy Migrate do that?

Perhaps testing Easy Migrate will be my next snow-day project. Thanks for the inspiration pete.

BTW, XXCLONE is free and works forevermore without a timed trial period. That appeals to most of us blokes down here on poverty flats.

All the best, dude.

 

Dude, thanks for your follow-up. I will indeed try the XXClone option, now that you've provided that fulsome explanation.

I looked at the app some years back, when I first started cloning system disks, and discounted it after I found how effective and simple it was to clone a single system disk with Migrate Easy. Soon after that, Acronis incorporated the clone tool into True Image, and that app works just as well as Migrate Easy (which is also an Acronis product, for those who didn't know this).

And as I noted earlier, I've also used the method to clone Vista system disks. Of course, the process works best when both source and target disks are hosted in another computer which is running TI or MI.

I have successfully cloned a disk when the source has also been the host system, ie, the running operating system clones itself to another (unallocated) drive. But I feel that it works best when done in another computer, and the source drive is totally inactive.

The above notes apply only to IDE disks - I've not tried the process with SATA drives, but it shouldn't be much different, except that the standard IDE 2xport\4 device setup is more flexible than SATA, IMHO. However, I've installed one SATA\PCIExpress card into a workshop pc and am just waiting on a second card to turn up (the mobo has 1x1 and 1x16 PCIE slots) so that'll be interesting.....

Anyway, back to the matter of multi-systems. Perhaps I ought to explain that the 'impetus' to try this came when I decided it would be handy to have a multi-antivirus disk for checking customer's system disks. At one time it was possible to have a multiplicity of AV programs on one system, but now, like many young adults, the better applications (NOD32, Kaspersky etc) have grown up and become much fussier about who they share their environments with. So I thought I'd add NOD to one system, Kaspersky to another and a 'yet-to-be-selected' AV app to a third OS. Then, I could check the customer's hosted HDD in one system, then reboot and do it in the second, then the third, and so on.

The reason for the multiple checks is that I've frequently found that different AV checkers may find different infections. This is possibly because their databases aren't always in sync, I guess. But these days there are devastating bugs out there, so I don't mind a little extra work, especially when it only takes a couple of reboots to try another tool.

But anyway, once I started thinking about this, the project took on a life of it's own So now I'm just as interested for purely academic reasons.

And it's not even snow-time here (actually it's 35c today in our little mountain town).

 

Thanks for the info Pete. Migrate Easy sounds very sociable. I'll check it out for comparison.

All the best, Dude

EDIT: After downloading and reading the instruction manual, I found that Migrate Easy insists on wiping ALL partitions from the target hard drive as opposed to deploying the migration to one particular partition. That doesn't allow for setting up more than one bootable partition on any hard drive.

 

I think I'm using Migrate Easy and\or True Image in different ways, and for different reasons than you, Dude and Pete. I build and repair pcs for a living (subsistence living, that is and soon got tired of going through the routine of installing the OS, THEN the mobo drivers, THEN all the various tweaks and fixes I use to tune up a nice fast system.

So I started building template disks, using old, spare drives (doesn't matter how slow as long as they have no bad sectors), on which I could do all the setup and trimmings once only, then clone the template hdd to a brand-new, unallocated drive. Doesn't matter if the template is 4GB and the target is 250GB - still works the same with MI or TI.

The only qualifier is that each template starts off being based on a particular motherboard model, so when you start using another (because the manufacturers have arbitrarily decided to pull THAT model, thus forcing you to begin using their 'improved' version), it's often necessary to build a new template. I say often because it's not always necessary. Sometimes a template will last through several motherboard 'upgrades', and only needs the motherboard driver disk inserted when the system is finally up and running to 'fine-tune' the installation. This has been my experience using Gigabyte motherboards, anyway. It may be different with other manufacturer's products.

The point I was making is that I've only ever used MI or TI when the target hdd was bare and 'unallocated'. This is the natural state of a brand new drive, but a working drive can be 'reduced' to this state with Partition Magic (or Acronis Disk Director), by simply 'deleting' the partition, or selecting 'delete and secure erase', which only takes a short while to reduce a system drive to 'bare metal'.

And as I've said, the process is infinitely easier when both source and target are hosted in another computer. I have one machine which I keep for just this purpose. Its IDE1 port (some BIOSs call it IDE0) is allocated to the OS on master and the CD\DVD as slave. IDE2 is kept free for the template drive on master, and the new, target drive on slave.

Interestingly, the unallocated drive isn't seen by Windows; it only shows up at boot, in the BIOS, and then later in Partition Magic.

When the cloning is finished, all that's necessary is to turn off the host system, remove the template drive and its new twin brother (or sister), mount the twin into its newly-built home, fire up and voila, a new HAL is ready to start work

 

OK Masonite, I think I understand your motive better now. If I read you correctly, you want to have a selection of XP installs, each somewhat purposely different, to clone onto new/renewed hard drives to install into other systems. They are to be contained on different partitions of a common physical hard drive.

If that be the case, either Acronis True Image or XXCLONE would be useful. It does appear that Easy Migrate would not work for your particular purpose since it wipes the entire target hard drive, taking out all existing partitions. Neither of the former do that.

I have both True Image and XXCLONE - I use True Image for my daily incremental backup chore and use XXCLONE to create fully bootable "Test Dummy" systems. It comes down to what works best for a specific task and beyond that, what the user feels most comfortable with. I tend to get in a rut and resist changes; comes with the aging process.

Good luck with your pursuit.

 

Almost correct Dude

This internet communication business is tricky; make your statements too brief and nobody gets the point; make 'em too verbose and nobody bothers to read to the end. LOL. Still, there's nothing better for information sharing, at the moment, anyway.

It might be better if I paint a picture. I didn't mention that I use rack drives in my workshop machines. I have around eight HDDs (3.5" IDE) each of which fits into a removable 'sleeve'. The workshop towers all have 5.25" 'sleeve holders', so all that's necessary to change a tower's system is to turn it off then insert whichever drive you need for the job at hand, XP, Vista, storage etc.

I used to keep a few W98 and Win2K drives at one time, but there's no demand for them now.

The new multiboot project will work like this (I hope).

A customer comes in with a virus-ridden machine, maybe so bad that it won't even boot. I pull the hard drive and mount it as a slave in a workshop tower. Then I insert my SuperTripleSystemXPP sleeve drive into the tower. I boot up and select System1, running NOD32 antivirus, and begin to cleanup the customer's drive. When it's finished I reboot and select System2, which contains Kaspersky antivirus, and do the same. Then, if necessary, I repeat the process with System3, which could be running Avast, Norton, Avira - haven't decided yet.

Each system could also have a different antispyware program, too, though IMHO Malwarebytes Antimalware takes a lot of beating at the moment.

I think it should work pretty well, so long as I can get the triple boot hdd up and running. Actually, I've been looking around since I last posted and it seems that there are many multiboot management apps available. From its online blurb it seems that even Acronis Disk Director can do the job.

So, back to XXClone, which I might try first. If I understand you correctly, it seems that I should take my unallocated 20G drive, mount it as a slave in a host system and split it into 3 partitions. (Though I'm not sure if Partition Magic can create 3 primary partitions??)

Then mount it in an empty tower, as a master, and install XP. Then I add XXClone and go on from there to establish the two extra XP installs.

Does this sound right?

 

Not exactly. I meant that you should install XXCLONE to your existing system drive and then clone that drive (present system as it exists) to any number of partitions that you have previously created on another hard drive or on partitions of the same hard drive as your system. In doing so, they will all be bootable partitions and available for deploying (using XXCLONE) onto other drives that have the minimum capacity to hold the data being offered. You could boot to each one and modify it prior to deployment to suit your purpose.

Using XXCLONE, any drive that you target with any of these clones will become a drive partition that will be able to boot as an independent system.