OS and dual boot

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Alan McGuinness

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I need help oh wise one’s.

I run a dual boot system
Win ME 40gig (The Office)
Win 2000 Pro 80gig (Home recording stuff)

What I want to do is upgrade the Win ME to Win 2000 Pro. Which would then mean I’d have Win 2000 Pro on both drive’s. Is this possible? And how would that effect the startup options? Will it still continue to offer me the option of which drive I wish to boot to. Or will it only see one OS and boot to whichever is first in line? If that is the case, then how do I then switch from one drive to the other?
The whole idea of the dual boot is to keep anything remotely related to recording as far as possible from the office stuff and all the associated nonsense that comes with it.

Will I still be able to do a direct boot to the 80gig recording drive?

Your thoughts please.

Alan.
 
I'm almost positive you can boot to two Win2k installations. I borked my Win2k installation a year ago, and after my reinstall, I could boot to my new install or the screwed up one.
 
you can definately do dual boot with two win2k pro....good call on getting rid of me...it sucks

ok as long as you have a 40gb hd and a 80 gb hd, you sould be fine...

hmmmmm.........trying to think of the right way to do this...

ok...load up ME...put the win 2kpro cd in to install.....click on the hard drive that ME is on to install.....then when you get around to it asking you what drive in the blue GUI prompt after it reboots...click on format the drive that ME was on(it'll tell you what to press to format the drive) format the drive(ntfs) that way it will get rid of all of the existing ME files....continue the setup as the screen tells ya and you should be fine....

you might have to make corrections to the BOOT.INI file if only one win2k comes up....if that happens i'll tell you what you can do

hope this helps

ss


p.s. only do this if you want to get a freshstart on the drive with ME on it....you WILL LOSE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE ON IT
 
Options?

That would be a problem, loosing the info on the ME drive would be a VERY bad thing.
What I was about to do, and hence the question before I do it, was to upgrade the ME to Win 2000 Pro in the usual manner. (Put the CD in and follow the prompts) The question would then be, will the computer still give me the option of booting to either drive at startup? At the moment I have the option of ME or 2000 via the up and down arrow key and enter to choose. If both drives are 2000 will it still have two options (both of which will say 2000) if so, that’s not a problem as I know which order they are in, via the BIOS settings.
I’m just being cautious before jumping in. (which is not the norm for me) As you point out ME is not the greatest (IMHO) and giving me various problems. So far I have not had any problems with 2000 (Home PC, Laptop and work PC) so hence the reason for the move.
The NTFS issue is a none starter as the audio drive is formatted as FAT32, so for compatibility reasons that’s how I’m going to set this one as well.

Your thoughts,

Alan.
 
ok...if you install win 2kpro onto the drive with ME on it, you will have dual boot on that drive...so you'll have 3 OS's on your computer.. you will have 3 options when you boot up, and i'm not sure which one (2kpro) will be on top of the list but you can always change the names of the systems on the boot.ini file in either win2kpro. If you have any unpartitioned space, you could move all the files you wanted to save onto that part of the hard drive and then delete the partition with the system files on it...
i had ME...it crashed and i upgraded to Win XP pro and because i had all my files on different partitions on my HD, i lost no data, i just had to reinstall some programs but once i did, i pointed the folders to their original location...

so to recap, if you install win2kpro on the hd with ME, you will have dual boot(fat 32) and you will have 3 options when you boot up...
 
What????

Now I’m confused (It don’t take much)
Correct me if I go wrong here, but this is my assumption.

I install 2000 over the top of (Upgrade) Win ME.
Win ME is now dead and no longer with us.
The OS on HD 1 will now be 2000 (was ME)
The OS on HD 2 will be 2000 (as before)

How do three OS come into the equation?

I like the sound of changing the OS name via the boot file, bios, cmos or whatever. This would then allow the PC to see two different OS (if only via name, 2000 1 2000 2) and would then ( I assume) give me the same options available at startup, that I have now. Ie: the ability to boot to two different drives.

How do you change the OS name for this purpose?
Keep it simple, please.

Alan.
 
Ok, the reason why there will be 3 operating systems on your computer is because ME is the home user version of Windows while 2000 pro is built off of NT, which is normally used for corperate america and more advanced users. When you use upgrade for 2000, it's going to look for an NT version of windows some examples are NT 4.0, 2000 Pro, XP pro. ME is and upgrade of 98 and 95 and 3.1. Does that make sense? They're both windows OS but they're almost 2 different "styles." So there's no upgrade option i don't believe. Thats why i was saying you needed to format the hard drive if you wanted to have ONE os on your original HD. By the way....to alter the Boot.ini file, you need to go to your local system disk(normally C:), and go to tools, view, click on show hidden folders and files, and also click on show hidden system files. Now the BOOT.INI file will appear on the local drive. If you click on it, you're gonna see all this mumbo jumbo like multi(0)part(0)disk(0)fdisk(0) (that's just an example). All you have to do, is find the part under " " you'll see it say something like windows 2000 Professional or something...all you have to do is rename what is in the quotes. Only in the quotes or you'll mess up how your computer boots.

Hope this helps...

SS
 
Alan McGuinness,

Since this is a fairly intensive procedure anyway, upgrading ME to 2000 is a waste of time and you will have problems later with all the excess baggage ME leaves behind...not to mention possible boot problems with all these OS clammering for space.

I have a twin Windows 2000 setup in my studio - one for office work and one for recording. The most efficient (but I will say scary way) to do this is to start fresh - wipe your 40 GB completely and start from scratch. Obviously this is the long way around and you need to have some experience with wiping sweat off your brow during a complete reformat. If you are feeling confident - here's a very quick roadmap on how to tackle this. A few assumptions from me - that you have some space to spare on that 80 GB. And you have all the drivers etc to ensure your hardware is set for Windows 2000.

1. First backup anything you want to keep - Move all keeper files from the 40GB (email, docs...etc) to the 80 GB.
2. Reboot (make sure your BIOS is set to boot from CD)
3. Pop in the Windows 2000 CD
4. Let setup roll through the first parts until you reach the point where Setup asks about where you want to install Windows 2000.
5. At this point, follow the onscreen choices and find your partition options.
6. Windows 2000 setup allows you to completely wipe the drive and set up new partitions on the fly. In my setup, I use a 20 GB for my system drive and I create 3 partitions - C: Windows 2000 DAW Size 5 GB....D: Windows 2000 Office Size 5GB....E: Data Storage 10 GB.
7. Once you decide on your partitions...continue with Setup as per usual.
8. If all goes well....you will have Win2K up and running on C:\
9. Repeat steps 2 - 4.
10. When Setup arrives at Step 4...simply choose D:\ as your destination partition and let Setup finish as per usual.

Again - This is a very high level look at this...but I estimate that I installed Microsoft O/S's since DOS 5.0 about 2000 times. Nothing works better than a rebuild especially when Windows ME is involved. Your machine will thank you for it.

My standard disclaimer: Make sure to backup your critical stuff - this procedure can be very complex and is a one way ticket - once you wipe the drive via Windows 2000 Setup - the data is gonzo. You need to ensure that you comfortable with complete disk rebuilds before attempting this. Unfortunately - there is no way to get comfortable without actually trying it. Lucky for you, you can always use that 80GB as a storage drive while you get comfy working on the 40 GB.

Let us know how it goes.

Cuzin B
 
i agree, wipe it out. I've done both, had two os2 (98 and 2000 pro) and it sucked....just wipe it out and you'll have no problems
 
God dam it!

Firstly, thank you for the time you put into your responses.
Geez, and here was me thinking throw in the CD and viola!
Having said that, I did just that on the laptop and everything seemed to go OK. It was running on Win 98se and I just installed 2000 Pro over the top of it and it went OK, maybe I got lucky, maybe there’s a whole host of shit still hanging around on the HD from 98se that I am blissfully unaware of. Anyway judging by your response I do at least have a few options here. At this point I should mention that the 40gig office drive is partitioned 30-10. The 10 gig area never having been used.

Plan A:
Put everything remotely important on the 10gig partition, then do a clean install of 2000 on the 30gig section, load all the relevant software and transfer everything back. Mmm sounds good, but having done this kind of thing before I am aware that nothing related to computers is that simple. My concern would be the saving and transferring of the important stuff, in particular e-mails and address books. At some point I will have to bite the bullet and get on with this, but at the moment I’m at the let it develop stage, this being a mental cooling off period whilst I figure out if its worth all the hassle, and trying to stop myself doing my usual “charging in armed with lots of enthusiasm but little to no knowledge.”

Plan B:
I don’t have one.

I have made a note of all your info for future reference, by the way, can you change the OS name via the bios screen instead of the boot file? Or are they one in the same thing?

Your thoughts

Alan.
 
Alan,

Thanks for the update.

To answer your question about changin OS names - simply edit the boot.ini file. After my 2 copies of Win 2000 are installed, I edit one instance to say "Windows 2000 DAW" and the other something like Windows 2000 Standard. This is the only way to change the names on the boot menu.

And as far as jumping in - planning is key. What are the major data backup concerns? What email app do you use? If it's Outlook then there is only one file to worry about. For docs, I just serach for all docs with a *.doc or *.xls or *.txt extension and go from there.

The critical element about having 3 paritions on the 40 GB is that once you do this twin Win 2000 setup once and get all your data files to E:\ , you never have to worry about backup. Just amke sure every scrap of data you save in a business/standard context goes on your data drive (E:\) instead of C:\ or D:\.

Keep in touch when you jump in!

Cheers,

Cuzin B
 
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