Advice sought on Dual/Triple Boot Win XP from PATA and SATA drives

get a boot manager that can deal w/ two xp pro installs. boot magic by powerquest/symantec used to work nicely but there are many others that do same. they 'hide' partitions and allow selections that are not normally allowed via the hiding part .... such as the dual xp install. system commander is another (i think?).

u can also use brute force BIOS boot options to turn off bootability on most newer systems. not a good idea in my book as on/off drives may change drive lettering or just make this a painful experience in general.

 

u'r probably right. i've never installed two xps on anything

w/ 3 win os' i'd still opt a 3rd party boot manager tho

 

There would be no problem Pete with installing XP directly to your SATA drive and using the ntloader as your bootmanager, as per your first post. However, if you later delete the XP installs on the PATA hard drive you will be deleting the ntloader, which resides inside the first installed XP on that drive. You can however repair things after you have reinstalled XP to the PATA drive, either with the recovery console or manually by editing the boot.ini file.

Your second idea of removing the PATA drive and installing to the SATA drive would also work, but if as you say you want XP on the second SATA hard drive, you would have to make this drive the first boot device in the bios, as the ntloader will only run from the boot drive. Because you will have removed all other WinNT installs from the computer the new XP on the SATA drive will be the only WinNT, so it will have its own ntloader, hence it must be on the boot drive.

 

Hi Pete,
I don't have SATA and the dual boots I have set up have been "static ", so no cause for changing them.

Areas I would really plan well are the partitioning and the drivers. You are a bit concerned about things going pear-shaped later on. I would see unplanned problems with partitions being one area where a minor disaster could happen if you try to start changing drives/partitions and things get "confused" in the boot sectors/MBRs (antiviruses with power to change information in the boot sector could bring the whole system to it's knees). I would try to have a partitioning "plan" all laid out (and maybe uninstall the antivirus before changing a boot drive) and also use the HDD manufacturer's MBR backup program before changing HDDs around.

Check for Win XP x64 drivers for your hardware. If you have a favourite printer for example, you may end up needing a new one (although I have heard of modifications to make XP drivers run in x64).

Matt

 

I use the asus A8V also.

That's similar to what I found, but I found it's better to make a very small partition on the IDE0 master (I tried 4GB, but it can likely be much smaller) and that will contain the boot files and allow you to do anything you wish with the rest of that drive. That allows for the BIOS insisting that the IDE0 master should boot.

With that partition, I believe that you can do anything you wish with whatever other drives you want to play with. I have IDE0 set up as a data drive, with all systems on the SATA0 80 GB drive.

I found that recovery console and adjusting boot.ini are interesting but not very helpful between installations and a new install would save time if there's any problem.

As always, I have installed the oldest OS first, except that I install linux last (why I call it multiboot) so grub runs first at boot, followed by the XP loader. I still use linux as my canary.

 

I'd just delete the partitions containg those OS. However, you'll lose the boot info on C:\ and the simplest correction for this is a reinstall of XP on the SATA. If the PATA will remain connected, XP will probably wish to put the boot files on it, so make a very small partition on the front of it as in my prev. post and then you should be able to do what you wish. As I said above, restore console (fixboot=deleting and making a new boot.ini) wasn't any help to me in this same situation.

Shouldn't happen after removing XP from C:.

Would only do that if you never intend to use the PATA on this PC.

 

Reread your first post in this thread, and I believe you can do what you mentioned there; again suggest you reserve the small partition on c: (IDE0) for the few loader files and boot ini. Found that the last install corrects the boot configuration, bringing it up to date, so a plan ahead is probably worthwhile. I'm not too good at that, though.

 

Once XP has assigned its own drive letter – D: in your case Pete – it’s not possible to change it. Microsoft say it is not possible, except to restore it back to the original in certain circumstances. It is a problem I have tried to crack and even though I have had limited success I can’t guarantee it and wouldn’t consider suggesting it. As Sparrow says, the only way to do it is to reinstall XP and get it to assign the letter you want during setup. Not straightforward and not always possible to make it the C: drive if the ntloader is on an other partition.

Perhaps it would be best for me to try and explain why yours came out as D: If you look in Disk Management you will see the partition that holds the ntloader listed as (Boot) and the XP partition you are booted into as (System). I know intuitively and against convention boot and system seem back to front, but this is just another quirk of MS and the ntloader. Because the (Boot) partition with the ntloader and XP on it is already a C: drive and this partition can not be hidden from or unmounted in the (System) partition, then another install of WinNT will always be given another letter, not necessarily D.

The other thing you should know is that the ntloader will always be installed to the Active primary partition on the boot drive. The ‘Active’ part being the important thing to remember. If the Active primary on the boot drive is FAT or NTFS then the ntloader will go there (or the one already there will be used, or replaced). It does not matter if this partition has a Windows OS on it or its just a data partition or completely empty. So as Sparrow says you can delete the current XPs on your boot drive and create a small primary partition, format it and make it the Active one on the disk, then reinstall to the SATA drive. However, and this part I can’t swear to, you might still end up with the new install as the D: drive.

During early install setup of XP from the CD all the partitions will show as already assigned drive letters. While some of these will change once booted into Windows, the one assigned to the partition you are going to put the install on won’t change. What letter the setup has assigned to it will carry through the install and be the final drive letter of the new Windows. Which means you can see what drive letter you are going to get before you even start.

I’ve got to get to bed now Pete but I’ll be back about midday. If you want all your Windows installs to see themselves as the C: drive then you need a third party bootmanager so that every install can have its own ntloader.

 

Your C: drive is the key. Put the Boot.ini file there (even if the C: has a version of DOS ). The dual boot loaders (ntloader I take it), then say the OS boot information is on the "X" drive... in your case it sounds like the OS boot information is on the S: drive.

My simplistic (working backwards) view .

Matt