Dual Boot XP home and XP Professional on a D900T

I have been running two HDs on my D900T, a 100G and 80G. I have run into space issues, all my programs (mostly games are on my 100G and I utilize the 80 for Music and Video storage). So I am considering sharing the load, (i.e. regular programs smaller drive and game programs on the larger drive). Can you run dual boot OS of the same Config. or can you only dual boot different OS, (98 and XP, Me and XP)..can you run XP Home and XP Professional. I ordered a new 120G HD and expect in about 3 days.

Thanks ahead of time,

 

you can, but is there a particular reason to dual boot XP home and pro? pro is infinitely better than home... and if you just boot pro, you'll save like 5GB of space.

 

The particular reason-
"I have been running two HDs on my D900T, a 100G and 80G. I have run into space issues, all my programs (mostly games are on my 100G and I utilize the 80 for Music and Video storage). So I am considering sharing the load,

(i.e. regular programs smaller drive and game programs on the larger drive)."

I plan to run XP Pro on the 120 and XP home on the 100. I tried to install Me a few months back and could not get it to dual boot. So I wonder if there is something particular about the D900T.

 

is there something on Xp home that you need? why don't you just keep the XP Pro on the 120gb drive and have that as master and set the 100gb and your new 120gb drive as slaves?

about dualbooting, you can dualboot if the different OS are on different partitions. i'm not sure why ME didn't work, but my friend has dualbooted XP Pro and XP Pro 64 bit and it worked on two different partitions.

 

Thanks for answering my question, it is greatly appreciated.

 

just to hop in here---the only real issue with dual booting pre-windows xp OS would be driver availablility, mainly, audio and video card.

I, too, am puzzled at the desire for installing Windows XP Pro and Home. Just focus on better file management rather than two OSs.

And finally, for those who come after, Windows XP is not infinitely better than Home. It's not even slightly better than home. Home is a subset of Pro, but they include the same core files.

Most people do not need Pro and will never know the difference--the real difference between the two is that one is intended for a managed environment (pro) and one is for an unmanaged environment.

Few people use remote desktop (And there are free alternatives), fewer still use multi-processor systems (NOT multicore, Home handles that just fine), ASR or IIS --and almost no one uses dynamic disks. About the most used feature that people will miss are the built in fax client and a few command line utilities (Taskkill and Tasklist).

The superiority of Pro over Home is hype and myth--again, if you are not hooking up to a domain (business or university) odds are you have no use for Pro

 

okay, well, I installed the 120GB HD in place of the 80GB HD, I installed Professional on the orginal 100GB HD and proceeded to install XP Home on the 120GB HD, and I installed, and I installed, and I installed it, kept getting the same error <windows root>\system32\hal.dll missing or corrupt, please reinstall, this only happened AFTER I boot to HOME (on the 120G) and then reboot to PRO (on the 100G), then go back to HOME (on the 120G). Finally, after about five times, I gave up, I still get the boot menu and I have to select PRO in order for it to operate.
My boot.ini lookes like this:

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

So I don't know if it is correct are needs to be fixed. Or is there something with the Clevo D900T and dual HDs that does not allow this???

My intial plan was to share the program load between OSes, put my high capacity games (i.e. F.E.A.R. 13GB, GRAW 4GB, and other games) on the 120GB HD and other programs and lower capacity games on the 100GB HD. I am just curious, but does the "jumper" on the slave drive make a difference??

Thanks for all your input, can anyone tell me how to remove the dual boot menu once I reformat the 120GB HD?

 

Removing the bolded statement should make the boot menu go away and take you directly into Widows XP.

I am actually surprised that is happening--what you have done shoud be working. When you choose Windows Home, boot.ini is using an ARC path to point to certain places.

Setup may have screwed things up, I suppose. I am unfamiliar with that model computer, but

multi(x) = disk controller. Since you have multi(0), this means the first disk controller

disk(0) = always follows multi(0) unless you have a scsi drive

rdisk(1) = SECOND PHYSICAL DISK (0=first, 1-second)

partition(1) = the FIRST partition the above disk (partition deviates from the above pattern where 0 is first, 1 is second, etc....)

So
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

should be pointing at the first partition on the second drive that is connected as a slave on the first controller.

When you load XP Pro, you should be able to naviate to the second drive--is there a \windows directory and does hal.dll exist in the system32 subdirectory

 

is one of these drives an sata drive? Perhaps it is being picked up as a scsi drive?

 

Well, decide to go ahead an delete the OS complete and just format the 2nd HD into 3 Separate partitions . 1 for programs (40G), 2 for storage (40G and 30G). I did not know you could run programs off a second drive, so I am going to delete some game programs from my main drive and reinstall them in the programs partition of the 2nd drive.

Thanks for all the input, I expected it would work, but for some reason, my D900T is picky, I am running dual boot on my Dell 700m, (XP Home & Vista Home Basic), so I did everything correct, but it just does not work on my D900T. Thanks again,

 

it should have worked...it has to be the sata being seen as a scsi--and windows setup screwing up the install...has so be.