Dual Boot: WinXP Pro & WinXP Home, 2 Disks

Hello,

I have a computer with hardware RAID and 2 SATA drives and WinXP Pro. It is working great. What I want to do is install WinXP Home on a separate drive, which is an IDE one. The idea is that the RAID drive(s) are used for my important office work, and the separate IDE drive is used for development work. I want to keep the two worlds separate, but having the drives visible to each other would be nice. Anyway, WinXP Pro was originally installed and then I booted up from the WinXP Home disk and installed it to the separate hard drive. No errors, all as expected, except... When I rebooted the system, the boot.ini file was not updated to give me access to the WinXP Home environment on the IDE drive. I've tried manually tweaking the boot.ini file, but to no avail. By adding a new OS line, the boot menu appears but I haven't been able to successfully boot the WinXP Home edition. I get a message saying that there is a problem in the configuration of the boot line. I know that there is an order for installing the oldest Win OS first, but does that apply within the same family (winxp home before winxp pro)? Help! Here is my original boot.ini file:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

I've tried adding a line after the last one in this file to give me the option to boot the WinXP Home OS by changing the disk() parameter to 1, 2, or 3 since I am unsure as to which number it would be. Oh, WinXP Home is installed in the usual Windows directory.

Drive C: 160GB SATA RAID (harware) source (WinXP Pro) -- NTFS
160GB RAID mirror -- NTFS
Drive D: 120GB IDE drive (WinXP Home) -- NTFS
Drive E: 60GB spare


Here is what System Information reported about my disk drives:

-------------------
SPARE DRIVE (Drive E)
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model MAXTOR 6L060J3
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk media
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 1
SCSI Target ID 2
Sectors/Track 63
Size 55.91 GB (60,036,318,720 bytes)
Total Cylinders 7,299
Total Sectors 117,258,435
Total Tracks 1,861,245
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size 55.91 GB (60,028,061,184 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes

WINXP HOME DRIVE (DRIVE D)
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model Maxtor 6Y120L0
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk media
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 1
SCSI Target ID 3
Sectors/Track 63
Size 114.49 GB (122,935,034,880 bytes)
Total Cylinders 14,946
Total Sectors 240,107,490
Total Tracks 3,811,230
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #1, Partition #0
Partition Size 114.49 GB (122,935,002,624 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes

WINXP PRO DRIVE (DRIVE C, BOOTABLE)
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model NVIDIA MIRROR 149.04G
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk media
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 0
SCSI Target ID 1
Sectors/Track 63
Size 149.05 GB (160,039,272,960 bytes)
Total Cylinders 19,457
Total Sectors 312,576,705
Total Tracks 4,961,535
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #2, Partition #0
Partition Size 144.16 GB (154,791,512,064 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes
-------------------

Thanks in advance for any help!

Mike

 

Try this for your boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect

 

Rebuild using xp cd- http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000648.htm
Concerning Disks and syntax- http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000492.htm

 

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmc_str_masc.asp

 

Hi Everyone,

I tried the following:

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect[/QUOTE]

but it didn't work... Same message as in my original note. Thanks for the suggestion, Shadow_Puter_Dude.

I found that when I installed WinXP Home, it created a boot.ini on the nonbooting drive. It's entry is as follows:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)

So, I am going to give it a try. Tonight, I'll start digging through the links that kadavill has suggested. Thanks for all the ideas, gang.

Mike

 

Try this for boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect

and if that one doen't work try

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect

 

Hi Shadow_Puter_Dude,

I used the following configuration...

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=""Microsoft Windows XP Home"" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

The good news is that I believe we found the WinXP Home installation disk! The bad news is that I get a new error... hal.dll is missing or corrupted and the OS cannot start. Yikes!!! That's a new one! I scanned the net and found that this could be due to a misconfigured boot.ini file, among other things. There seem to be a lot of "remedies", but none seemed to stand out as a solid choice. I am playing with reinstalling WinXP Home again, but I don't believe that this will really do any good since I didn't receive any errors the first time. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

 

Well at least we are headed in the right direction. I have encountered that error once before and it was definitely the boot.ini configuration.

Since the boot.ini on the non-booting drive says it is partion 3 lets try this.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect