Re: Dual Boot Sweet Tip

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"Uncle John" wrote:
For those interested in dual booting from different or twin identical OS I have happened on the following neat way of doing it:

1 Two disks master and slave, about same size. In my case SATA 74 GB Westinghouse Raptor

2 Windows XP Pro installed with all apps on Master=Disk 0
3 In Windows use CasperXP to diskcopy Disk 1 to Disk 2 (Windows 1 = Bios 0)
4 Reboot, set the bios with Slave=Disk 0 as first had disk boot priority, set Boot from CD as the first general boot device
5a Leave the Windows CD in the Optical Drive and reboot take care not to touch a key while rebooting or the CD will be fired up, the PC will boot into the master Disk
5b Take the CD out and Reboot. The PC will boot into the slave disk
6 The slave disk in my case for backup is updated nightly by Casper XP scheduled copy (System Restore has to be disabled on the slave to be able to diskcopy properly.

The behaviour of being able to select which hard disk will may be specific to my Gigabyte motherboard and Award bios, but the system will work, ;less sweetly simply but switching the hard disk boot priority in the bios before booting

Ainsi dit. ansi soit!-
Uncle John 


   Using Windows XP's built-in multi-boot manager would be easier.
   The only thing you have to do is see that another entry is added in
   the C:\boot.ini file.  That can be done automatically when the 2nd
   OS is installed, via one of the tabs in msconfig, or manually using
   Notepad.  See the Microsoft Knowledge Base for the syntax of
   boot.ini .  The advantage of using the boot manager to multi-boot
   is that you can put multiple copies of the OS on a hard drive and
   be able to select which one gets loaded.  With the method of
   adjusting the BIOS's HD boot order, you can only select which
   HD does the booting.

*TimDaniels*
.

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