Dual booting two copies of XP home - any issues to look out for?

I dual boot XP (home) with WinME which is on the C Drive/partition with XP on D drive/partition.

I'm finally going to put WinME to rest: R.I.P. 2001 - 2004

Want I want to do is install another copy of XP on C. The new dual boot will be the new XP Home on C and the current continuing on D.

That copy of XP will be my original XP cd + SP2. The Hardware environment is still the same as when I went thru WPA the first time. I'm just about to install new hardware, and want to get this out of the way before then.

Anyone see any issues?

Regards - Charles

 

I did it for over a year with no problems. To make a possible long story short, I actually used a disk imaging program to do a "Disk Copy" from the C: to the D:. I had no intention of dual booting.

When I next booted the system, it had automatically set up the dual boot just by virtue of detecting the second system to be present! Blew me away. I left it and played around with it until I grew weary of the confusion it caused at times. I finally decided it was wasting space so deleted it and got back to normal.

Incidentally, there was no issue of Activation since it was a direct clone, bit by bit.

Good luck.

 

Hi Steve,

That's what I'm hoping to avoid

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Surfer,

Thanks for the idea. WPA is about the only issue that I can think of that may be a problem.

Regards - Charles

 

I used Disk Image 2002 but Ghost will do it also. Acronis True Image won't, only does images, no clones.

Now, with the $79.99¢ you'll be saving, you can pay for the cloning software and have change back.

 

Interesting, I have Acronis Trueimage 8.0 and it sure does clones. I recently used it to clone to a larger HD. After the clone completed, I shutdown, removed the original disk, powered up with the replacement (cloned) disk as the primary, and up she came without a murmur. Only noticeable thing was that XP detected new hardware and installed the newer disk. This was after windows had loaded. Nice!

 

Well Paul, I'm still sitting in the cheap seats with version 6 so maybe I'd better get my Christmas list updated to include the new stuff. My version doesn't offer direct cloning so I've always used Ghost for that. I could image it and then expand the image but that's not as handy as directly cloning it.

I'm glad to hear it's getting even better. I have had great service from it!

 

Haven't seen v6.0. V7.0 I think has the cloning function, and v8.0 has a few further improvements. I used Ghost a few times and whilst it was OK, is not as simple (and quick) as True Image. Only gripe I have is that sometimes creating an image from within windows will come up with an image corrupted message when varifying that image. I must do a restore on a non critical system and see if it will still restore OK. Seems to create a flawless image when I boot from the startup disc an create the image from there though.

 

I didn't think there would be a problem with WPA over this - doesn't make sense that it would, same hardware environment.

I got confirmation of this on another forum by someone that did this - as long as its not done within 30 days of the last install.

Don't want to use the clone option if I can help it because the point of the exrcise is to have a different setup - different AV and firewall to begin with.

After that, I'm going to use imaging.

Regards - Charles

 

I guess cloning would be good for a base install. You could always uninstall programmes you don't want and install any replacements after the clone install. I tend to agree that WPA shouldn't be a problem with dual booting the same OS, as it's the same HW. That's one I haven't tried though.