Re: Dual booting two independently installed instances of XP

This would be great ! Thanks much for the URL on how to swap/change drive
letters in the registry.

How do you direct regedt32 to edit the registry entries on the other
partition/drive (not the current boot drive ?) Or do you need to do this
from the recovery console for the current active partition ?


"John John" wrote:

The fact that the computer is going into a reboot loop at the login
screen is an almost dead giveaway that the boot drive letter has been
changed. The drive letter onto which Windows is installed cannot be
changed, the drive letter assigned at the time of installation must be
kept, the only way to change the drive letter assignment is to reinstall
Windows. If the installation was cloned from an installation on drive
"C:\" it must keep and use the same drive letter. It is possible to
have each installation reside on a C:\ drive letter, that will in no way
affect the other installation, it will only make a difference if you
have common shortcuts or batch files that refer to drive letters.

The following article explains things a bit :

Unable to log on if the boot partition drive letter has changed
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/249321

Being that you have a dual installation and that you can boot one of the
installations you can simply use Regedit from the working installation
and edit the registry on the non-booting installation:

How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188/

John

Chronus wrote:
I have two separate drives with windows XP pro installed (one was actually
cloned from the other, shortly after initial installation, as a backup) and I
can boot from either drive, if the other drive is no powered. Drive 1 is
large enough to have a 2nd 30+GB primary partition, and I have copied
(cloned) the contents of the 2nd drive onto this partition and would like to
configure boot.ini so that the ntldr would give me a choice of booting off
partition I (for my development work), or partition II (where I do my
photoshop stuff.) Either case I would like to have the other partition be
mounted as, say, drive D, and remain accessible for shared files (I realize
that this would expose XP on the D drive to viruses or other risks.)

I am wondering if this can be done without hiding the alternate partition
and, if so, what should boot.ini look on each of the bootable partitions ?

I added an entry to boot.ini on the first partition to designate
rdisk(0)partition(2) as the alternate OS but when choosing this (2nd) option
during boot, I end up in a login loop, as if the OS/registry on the 2nd
partition is not self-consistent. Is this possibly due to the fact that the
2nd partition was previously mounted as a D drive
when the machine was booted off the 1st partition ? Or could there be a
complication with ntldr trying to figure out which partition is active,
independent of the entry in boot.ini ?

Would appreciate any suggestions on how to make this work !



.

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