Dual Boot 2K & XP

Hi

Recently decided to fit an additional HDD and install XPHome The old drive worked successfully on 2K.

The installation completed OK and I edited the boot.ini to allow dual booting. All starts OK exceptthat the 2K wont move past the login box; Administrator with no password, starts to open then "saving your settings" and back to the logon box. The XP boot completes all OK.

Unfortunately the 2K disk wont boot at all if running standalone, I guess the dual boot on the XP disk has deleted the boot.ini on the 2K.

Does anyone have any suggestions without having to run a fresh 2k install, unfortunately I don't seem to have a 2K Bootable CD.....

G

 

You definately don't want to run another 2K install.

Please look at both disks with explorer.exe to see if the 2K OS is still there (make sure the XP didn't overwrite it). If it is, post the boot.ini from the root of the XP disk, which is what is booting. the files on the root of the 2K disk are no longer used to boot, as you found out.

Try taping F8 after you highlight 2K in the boot menu and choose safe mode or possibly tell it not to automatically restart, so it puts up a bsod that has an error message.

 

The 2K was on a different HDD which was disconnected during th XPH install to the new HDD, so there was no danger of over-writing.

I did try Safe boot, Last Known etc. but all brought me to the logon box and the original problem.

Since yesterday however, the 2K option fails to boot at all so, I've given up on the dual boot idea, shame though because there were some programmes on that driver that I no longer have dsks for. C'est la vie.

Thanks for the advice anyway

G

 

Think you give up too easily. You haven't done anything terribly wrong. However if you had left the disks connected while installing XP, that would have avoided your problem. XP is designed to dual boot automatically when installed in the presence of an earlier OS.

It may be worthwhile to try to fix the 2K OS, but I haven't encountered this exact situation previously. If you can borrow a 2K install disk, you might do a repair of the OS (as a single HDD, XP disconnected); can't recall for sure if that's available on the CD. If the 2K can be made to boot, then a repair of XP should correct the dual boot problem.

I still think you should use explorer to examine the root of booth disks with details enabled and hidden/system files unhidden to see which files have changed on the two roots. Files we are interested are:
boot.ini
bootsect.dos
cdldr
ntdetect.com
ntbootdd.sys
ntfs.sys
ntldr
They may not all be present; let us know. Be sure to record their size, since that depends on the OS that installed them.
Also look in winnt\system32 for:
ntoskrnl.exe
hal.dll
config