Desperate help on dual boot win XP / win 2K

Hello all,

Finally I found a forum where I can ask for help. Well let me start that I had win xp and win 2k working successfully on two 20 GB harddisks. Win XP was installed on C: and Win 2K on D:. Recently I bought a 160 GB harddisk, so I wanted to replace C: hard disk. Then as instructed by Maxtor, I begin formatting and partition the new hard disk. (I still had my D: that is the hardisk with win 2k still plugged, I had replaced the old win Xp disk). Now I encountered some NTLDR missing and finally with Dells support, I finished installing the win xp. On geeting into my computer, I had the following in front of me:
the old D: drive was now C:
my CD rom was now d:
and there was only one more hard drive - the new one E:
and the other 2 partitions were missing. I dont know how to retrieve them.

I thought maybe I can retrieve it once I reboot.

There was another surprise for me.....It no longer gave me the option to dual boot. That means it was default win xp.

PLEASE HELP ME.

Thanks
ramuk

wow...well what I wouldve done was image your xp to the new drive and then use partition magic to increase the partition or create a new one. or you could back up all your stuff to cd and just wipe out everything and start from scratch. now if both drives were formatted with ntfs you might have lost ownership of the other files. whoops you can even see them. can you see them in computer management? Now I'm wondering if the MBR along with the boot.ini is trashed.

phishhead,

I still have my other hard disk, the only reason I didnt copy that because it has some virus or some crap called Bullseye network which runs a bargains.exe in the background. I dont know how to get rid of it.
Is it possible if I copy only the boot.ini from that hard disk and copy to the new hard disk?

thanks for ur reply

you can go to the recovery console and type in fixboot

where is recovery console, how do i get there. Please can u explain. what exactly am i trying to do? Do u mean to say that I can soon have my dual boot back?


Here is what my boot.ini says:

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

You could maybe look into Virtual PC (depending on what you're doing with the 2 OSes). It makes it so you don't have to reboot the machine to start up a new computer in your computer. Pretty hard to explain.... But if you aren't doing anything too demanding with your machine, and you have half a gig (at least) of RAM then you may want to check that out. And you can make it so your 'virtual pc' has a hd that expands as it needs. And on your regular PC its just a file. :) Pretty slick program.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx
(Yes, microsoft, but it really is a cool product)

fixboot and fixmbr within the recovery console might get you out of this jam :D

woah phishhead,

sorry let me just rephrase what my question is. I am not a computer freak. So please explain. My question is Can I be able to dual boot with my present situation?
R u suggesting I format the new hard disk and start again. If that is the case can u tell me how do I dual boot with me not meddling the hard disk having win 2000.

or r u telling me to use virtual pc to rectify the dual boot?

i would recommend virtual pc then that would be the easiest solution. til next reformat then you gotta a do it the ol' fashion way.

thanks phishhead, i will try this and let u know what happened.

phishhead,

I finally rectified the problem using recovery console.
What I did was, took out my d: drive which had win 2k. Reinstalled win xp on my new hard disk and then connected the win 2k hard disk. finally with reconsole got back the dual boot.

Thanks for ur patience and help. :)

ramuk

Next time just edit Boot.ini so it points to the right installations.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Curio

Next time just edit Boot.ini so it points to the right installations.

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Microsoft should label the partitions/drives in a more user friendly manner...

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

instead of multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

That is all indecipherable to some people.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ramuk

phishhead,

Thanks for ur patience and help. :)

ramuk

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:thumbsup:

Seeing that post reminds me of something you may not have noted yet. If you go to System Control Panel-->Advanced Tab-->Performance Settings there is now a DEP tab(XPSP2). By default its only enabled for Windows but you can turn it on for everything there.
For the uninitiated DEP stands for 'Data Execution Prevention' this is a directive which marks memory space used for variables as non-executable. This in turn means that 'Buffer Overrun' exploits are mainly stopped or nutralised. The /NoExecute=Optin switch in boot.ini is part of that and was introduced in SP2.