2 bootable copies of WIN XP

I am interested in installing 2 copies of win xp, one for a few games I have that refuse to play smoothly on my system since SP3 and other 'UPDATES' have come down the pike. (The games played fine when I first built the system.)and another as a fully patched system which I am using right now.

My question is: Will XP create a dual-boot menu at startup where I can switch between them. (I have this setup on another system that has WIN XP and WIN 98 as a dual-boot). I have a friend that says it will work, but I need a 3rd party boot program. Is this due to having 2 WIN XP partitions, I never needed this when I installed WIN 98 on the WIN XP machine.

BTW, this site has proved invaluable for me to troubleshoot several of my friends systems, when they get infections and such, keep up the great work.

 

Win XP will automatically set up a dual boot menu after install with the newly installed OS as default and old copy as second choice. No third party software necessary. [You can later change the default OS by right-clicking MyComputer>Properties>Advanced tab>Start up and Recovery>Default OS drop-down box.]

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Editing the boot.ini file in either copy of Windows can be used to re-invoke the boot loader should it ever fail to appear due to playing around with partitions, reformatting etc.

 

Thanks for the information. I thought XP created dual boot menus, but was not going to do it if I needed 3rd party software, as it is not THAT big of an issue.