Dual Boot XP and 2003

[Biohead]

Is it OK to dual boot both XP and 2003 Enterprise?

Back when I tried to Dual Boot XP and 2000 Server it Fuxxored up my XP installation and I've hated 2000 ever since. I already have XP installed on my C:\ Partition, so can I just pop 2k3 on D:\ or will I need to edit some boot settings to access both of them?

[Mr Snrub]

Is it OK to dual boot both XP and 2003 Enterprise?

Back when I tried to Dual Boot XP and 2000 Server it Fuxxored up my XP installation and I've hated 2000 ever since. I already have XP installed on my C:\ Partition, so can I just pop 2k3 on D:\ or will I need to edit some boot settings to access both of them?

Dual booting Windows is for simple (read: non-RAID, possibly non-SATA) configurations straightfoward for the most part.

The reason installing Windows 2000 after XP screwed up the XP system was most likely because you regressed the boot loader.

Same thing happens if you install XP after 2003, for example - the boot loader on the active system disk has to be the later one as the older boot loaders won't understand how to load NTOSKRNL.EXE for later versions of Windows.

The repair option on the XP disk would have sorted you out before - or manually restoring NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM at the root of C:

[Biohead]

Cheers...

That 2000 thing was going back a few years now when I was just starting with computing.

[hougtimo]

yeah...thats not a good reason at all to hate win 2k. its is *the* perfect OS. end of, no discussion, it IS!

[os2fan2]

You can quite happily dual boot Windows 98, NT, 2k, XP, 2k3 and Vista all on the same box. I done this!

You need to put these into different partitions, and make sure that the 98 and NT partitions are in the first 8G. Install all of the rest, except Vista, and then install vista. Alternately, you can use vista's utilities of fixfat or fixntfs to fix the boot sector to boot into the NT/2k3 style or Vista style boot manager.

For practical purposes, you should name the computer by different names for each Windows install, if the computer is to be in a network. That is, you should not use the same computer-name for both the 2k and XP installs. You could use version-numbers as append, eg 98, 40, 50, 51, 52, 60 for these, eg TESTBED98.

You can make these all use the same swap file, as well. Apart from that, there is no real probs.

Give NT 2 MB, 2k 4.0 MB, XP 4.1 MB, 2K3 4.2 MB and vista 8 MB. Make these partitions different, so that the size itself makes the partition name.

You can also install BartPE into this sorted mess, and make it use the X: drive as well. Install it into a second primary partition, and then use something to boot that (eg a boot-sector).

W