Which version of Windows on which drive?

OK.... I'm working on a PC with 2 hard drives, and a total of 5 partitions. 3 of the 5 partitions have Windows installs, the boot menu displayed 2 OSes: XP Home and Server 2003. I determined that XP Home was on C: and got the OK to format and reload. Cool. So XP Home is running fine now. The boot menu still comes up with XP Home and Server 2003. When I select Server 2003, it goes to a black screen for 5 seconds and then reboots, but it booted to a login screen before re-installing XP Home. So I figured I just need to re-write the boot.ini, right? But I have 2 partitons besides C: (we'll say E: and F: ) with Windows installs on 'em that don't boot. How do I tell which one has the Server 2003, and which one is something else?

 

Have you tried Start,Search. Type in Windows Server 2003. Couldn't hurt to try.Be sure to look in all folders including hidden ones.

 

Well, check the folder date modified dates of the Windows folder as XP Home was probably the first., that should give you a hint. I've had 5 Win OS's on at one time, best way to know what is where is to name the drives/partitions for future reference.

Oops, get into msconfig to delete the boot.ini entry that you don't want.

 

Oh, run the verify command, that should help.

 

Absolutely. This is how I have always set up multi-boot systems in the past, but I didn't set up this particular system.

Thanks to everyone for your responses, but here's what I ended up doing: I booted to the Server 2003 install CD and selected "Repair" for the install option. It scanned and found the install on drive D:. The only problem was that in XP Home, drive D: is the DVD drive!!! So I had to boot back in to XP Home and make a note of the exact partition sizes since the drive letters in the running OS were different from those in setup. I then booted back into Server'03 setup and figured out (using the drive/partition sizes) which was which and fixed everything from there.... phew.... what a cluster@%!$

[dlb]