Win 2K & XP Home dual boot

[aongusa]

Hi,

I have an Inspiron 8500 that was preconfigured with XP Home.
In order to run Embedded Visual Basic I overwrote it with
Win 2K. The boot menu has the two OSs on it though only the Win 2K one works. I have a recovery disk for XP Home. Should I be able to set it up so that I actually have 2 OSs working on the same machine and does anyone have any idea how to go about this?

Thanks in advance,

Regards,

Tony

 

[bcastner]

The normal order is earliest OS first, so as to protect the boot loader files of the later OS.

You will need access to another machine running XP, Doug Knox explains the procedure:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_2k.htm

 

[wolluf]

How did you install 2k? You said 'overwrote' - does that mean you've installed it into the same partition (2k on \winnt, XP on \windows?). This is not a good idea for dual booting - each operating system needs its own partition. Dual boot will work (to a degree) in same partition, but for example they're both sharing \Documents and Settings and \Program files - which can lead to problems.

If you want to enable the dual boot as that link bcastner gave suggests, you need copies of XP's ntldr and ntdetect.com. If you didn't back these up, you can usually find them on install CD - but you've a recovery disk - don't know if they're on there (they must be in the image that it will overwrite with, but don't know if accessible). But you can find them in SP1 or SP2 (just open the SP file with something like winzip - and extract what you need). Then just overwrite the 2k versions in root of C: (from within 2k) - or as bcastner says, another XP installation.

But as I said, I wouldn't recommend running the dual boot if both on same partition.