Multi Drive Windows XP duel booting question.?

Question

I have installed windows xp on multiple drives within one PC. Is there an easy way to make them accessible on startup? I have installed xp on two different partitions on the same drive before and that was easy to set up duel booting it just asked me which one to load on startup, however now that I am using different drives the same option is not accessible. I know I can go to bios and change boot priority there, but I dont want so many steps if it can be avoided since I will be jumping between installs frequently. Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I don't usually run into instances when users want to boot into 2 different instances of XP... Usually it is a user who wants to dual boot XP and Linux.

However, I believed that you can edit the boot.ini file to acheive your goals.

The KB article below may be what you are looking for...

Answer 2

edit boot.ini in your system drive ("c:\boot.ini")

you should find something like:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect





just copy and past this line one more time, change partition with your other partition (usually 1=C, 2=D or you can find this info from computer manager accessed through right click on myComputer and "manage") and also change XP Pro... with what ever you want it to show when you boot.



accessing boot.ini sometimes may hassle you, because it is a system,hidden,readonly file. you can fix that by opening a command window (type cmd in run) and run these commands



cd \

attrib -r -s -h boot.ini

edit boot.ini



and edit it there

Answer 3

stable day, i had a prior computing device with win ninety 8 & ME. what i take advantage of to do is that if i needed besides from no longer effortless force 2, i'm going to pass into the bios and do the two 2 issues, pick which no longer effortless force u decide for besides in the boot series determination or i disable one among d no longer effortless drives so the computing device will try to boot from that's avaliable. desire it works, Laterz!

Answer 4

There is no way... since they are on different drives, you will have to boot to one or the other.