Ok, I'm a fairly knowledgeable computer user, but for the life of me I can't find the info I'm looking for. Basically what I'm wanting to do is dual boot XP Pro, and Windows MCE. Now I already have XP Pro installed on one drive, and MCE installed on another. What I failed to do was have both drives hooked up at the same time when I installed both Os's. Is there a way to edit my boot.ini to make the choice of what OS i want to boot? My C: drive has XP Pro, and my G: drive has my MCE on it. Any advice would greatly be appreciated. Even if it means that I copy what's in my Boot.ini and paste it in here in hopes of it helping, I will. Again thanks

Cory

 

Take a look here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022
to get you started.

 

Thanks, that helped a little, but I don't know how to make it so that another drive can be added. I understand adding a partition now, but my MCE is on a different drive all together

 

[QUOTE] but my MCE is on a different drive all together/QUOTE]
I understood that. You just need to edit your boot.ini file.

The boot.ini file format is a standard ini file that determines which Windows operating system to load at boot, and also determines which Windows installations are available from the menu at boot up. From Microsoft: "Windows (specifically Ntldr) uses the Boot.ini file to determine the operating system options to display during the startup (boot) process"

Here's a sample boot.ini file from a Dell computer with XP Home and Professional installed:
[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect


The first line, [boot loader] contains two variables, the first one, timeout, corresponds to the amount of seconds to display the boot menu. The second value, default, specifies the Windows installation that will boot if no other installation is chosen. In this case, the Dell computer defaults to loading the Windows XP Home installation, on the first hard drive.

Multi refers to the type of hard disk interface. In this case it is multi, which means that it is either an IDE, EIDE, ESDI drive, or a SCSI adapter with no built in BIOS. In other words, the only time you'd replace multi, is if you had a SCSI interface with a built in BIOS. disk(0) refers to the 1st physical hard drive. disk(1) would refer to the second hard drive on that channel. rdisk(0) is specific to SCSI drives, and is usually fine at 0. partition(1) means the actual 1st partition on the drive, so in the above example, the Windows XP Home installation is on the first hard disk on the first partition. Windows XP Professional is on the second hard disk, and on the second partition on that hard drive. \WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" says that the Windows folder is located at \WINDOWS and the "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" tells the NTLDR boot screen to literally display "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" as the selection.

 

A little off subject, but you could always download the free MS virtual PC and set it up on that.

 

I got it figured out guys. Thanks for the help. I just downloaded a 3rd party boot manager. Thanks again