Re: XP Home and XP Pro on two separate drives
- From: "Timothy Daniels" <TDaniels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 11:31:35 -0700
"Peter Malling" wrote:
I had a drive with XP Home, which had become too small. So
I purchased a new drive on which I'll install XP Pro. However,
I still want to keep the XP Home disk until I'm pretty sure that
I've got all programs and settings I need transferred to the
new disk. By default, the system should boot from the new
XP Pro disk.
The old disk is a 80 GB
The new disk is a Maxtor 6L300R0 300 GB
How should the jumper settings on the disks be, which should
be master and which should be slave?
It doesn't matter. Just install the WinXP Pro on the new HD
while the old HD is disconnected.
Here's how most BIOSs work: The HD boot order (i.e. HD
boot priority) has a its *default* in the case of IDE HDs:
Master, ch. 0,
Slave, ch. 0,
Master, ch. 1,
Slave, ch. 1.
In the case of SATA HDs, the default HD boot order is just
their channel number order. Mixes of IDE and SATA usually
have the HD boot order overflow from IDE to SATA..
Using this HD boot order, you can control which HD is
tested first for the presence of a Master Boot Record (MBR).
The 1st HD encountered with an MBR takes control and
and looks for the Primary partition marked "active". The MBR
hands control to the Boot Sector on that partition. The Boot
Sector then looks for the loader (ntldr) within its partition, and
the boot loading proceeds under control of ntldr. In the process
of booting, ntldr looks at a file called "boot.ini" that tells it where
to find the folder for the OS - which may be on any partition
on any HD in the system.
During installation of WinXP, the installer looks around to see
if there are any other partitions that are already present, and
it names the installation partition according to what names are
available. It also looks for OSes already installed. If it finds none,
it builds a boot.ini file that lists only one OS - the one that it is
currently installing - and it names its partition "C:".
It's much simpler conceptually (and adheres to tradition) to have
the running OS calls its own partition "C:". You can accomplish
that by installing the OS in an isolated HD that has only a single
partition at the time of installation.
Now, assuming that you've installed the WinXP Pro in its own
isolated partition on the new HD, you can control which OS
starts up in one of two ways - by adjusting the HD boot order in
the BIOS or by using the boot.ini file's dual-boot configuration.
Via the BIOS:
Jumper the 2 HDs differently or put them on different channels
so that they have different positions in the HD boot order. The
HD with the highest priority will control the booting, and since
the only OS seen during its installation was itself, the OS on
that HD will be indicated by its boot.ini file. By *default*, the
Master on ch. 0 will have the highest boot priority. If there is
no HD as "Master", the "Slave" on ch 0 will have the highest
priority, etc. Then, to vary the HD boot order, go into the BIOS
and adjust the HD boot order whenever you want to change
which HD boots.
Via boot.ini
You can edit the boot.ini file (at C:\boot.ini) with Notepad. Under
the line "[operating systems]", there will be a single line with an
entry that matches the line listed after "default=". That single entry
is the entry for the OS that boots as default and it will have a
parameter "rdisk(0)" in it. Just add another entry under the
"[operating systems]" line that has "rdisk(1)" instead. Also
change the value after "timeout" from 0 to some reasonable
timeout value such as "10" to give you 10 seconds to decide
which OS to select. Do that on both HDs. Then, at boot time,
ntldr will present you with a menu having 2 selections corresponding
to the 2 OSes. The OS on "the other" HD will always be the
2nd entry in the list. On the HD containing the WinXP Home,
the 2nd entry will be for WinXP Pro. On the HD containing the
WinXP Pro, the 2nd entry will be for WinXP Home. You can
indicate this in the arbitrary text string after each entry in boot.ini.
You can edit the boot.ini file for either HD regardless of which
OS is running. The partition of the running OS will be "C:", and
the partition for the other OS will be "D:".
You can also edit the boot.ini file for the currently running OS by
clicking Start/Run/enter msconfig/select BOOT.INI tab. You can
then edit the file manually, or by clicking "Check All Boot Paths",
msconfig will do it automatically for you.
*TimDaniels*
.
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