dual booting two xp partitions?

I currently have XP installed on my computer - however, I want to partition the drive into two drives and have two instances of windows XP Pro installed on the same machine (not looking for Vista or Linux).

I can't seem to find any guides anywhere on how to do this. I can't find a boot loading program that's not designed to work with linux or vista.

can anyone help me find a guide on how to shrink the partition, format the remainder into NTFS, install the 2nd OS, and, most importantly, have a dual-booting program that lets me choose between them.

thank you!

 

can't help about shrinking but dual/multiple installation of XP works fine. I have one in my C, one in my D and the boot manager is just the standard XP one. No special treatment needed, just tell it to install to the new partition you want.

 

You can install 2 (or more) XPs on the same drive.

At some point in the installation it'll prompt you to overwrite the existing install, say no, next thing you'll see is a question about where to install it. Enter a new directory name and you'll be good to go.

 

so I should just shrink the current partition, format a new partition after this one as say "D" in NTFS, and install XP into that partition? sounds easy enough

 

here's a guide if there's an existing windows XP in the hardisk.

Partitioning your Drive in Windows XP without destroying/losing your files

then install the other in the created partition(use primary).

 

The best way to be doing this is making completly independant boot partitions. Follow this guide here:
http://www.trombettworks.com/multi-boot.htm
This will work with any OSes you want, none of them will see each other. But it will take some experimenting because this guide has not been updated, and i've found some small issues that are easely fixed but if you don't will make the whole process not work.

Like for example when you install XP in a partition that is not physically the first one but tagged as the first primary, the XP install will eventually reflag everything in physical order, and because of that XP wont be able to start, and when that happens you're gonna have to back into Ranish Partition Manager and reflag everything as it was, but the problem is XP install will have wiped your MBR and the boot manager with it, so you'll need to boot to DOS and run Ranish Partition Manager again. I boot to DOS with a win98se CD because i don't have a floppy drive, some of you might not have that either, and might not have win98 CD or some older stuff like that. You could get a freeDOS CD, i haven't tried that though.