I have a 120 gb hard drive, which is my old one and just recently bought a 200 gb hard drive. I have made my old drive the slave and the new 200 gb HD the master. I have having problems partitioning and installing the OS. I would like to have a C drive with 110 gb with XP running, a D drive with 20 gb with Windows ME running and then a E drive with 70 gb with no OS. I know I have to load ME first and XP second, but the ME boot disk does not see my 200 gb to partition? It only sees 130 gb because other programs like this do not support larger hard drives. What do I do? I tried a partitioning program called BootIt, which recognized the 200 gigs, but after partitioning, the ME and XP boot disk didn't like the partitioning that the BootIt created. Also there is an issue with FAT32 and NTFS. I think my ME Os will need a FAT32 file system and the XP will need NTFS. I have found out that ME will not be able to see the NTFS files. Any help I could get would be great! Thanks
Two hard drives (one is 200 gb) with two different OS
- Thread starter Zoddman
- Start date
Do you want to dual boot
What you are trying to do doesn't seem to add up. There is no purpose for having a bootable OS on a drive D since it could never be booted up. Your master hard drive can have up to three primary partitions, formatted to boot different versions of Windows, but only one can be active and bootable at a time. The other would be "hidden". Microsoft supports this under what is called a dual boot configuration. Setting up a dual boot config can be a little complicated. Assuming you have XP installed already, check out the following link which describes the procedure to create a dual boot by adding ME to your C: drive. http://www.winxpfix.com/page5.htm#howwin982000 I would also check out other write-ups on Google.
What's your plan for the 130GB drive (will you keep it or retire it)?
Your XP primary partition would be an NTFS but the ME will have to be FAT32. When visible each would be your C: drive. After you get the two primary partitions set up, you must create an extended partition with at least two logical drives (say D: and E
. One will be a FAT32 the other NTFS. When you boot to XP it will be able to see and use both, however, ME will only be able to access the FAT32 drive. If you need to share files between XP and ME the FAT32 drive would be the place for them.
The Partition Magic product, available from Symantec, comes bundled with a product called BootMagic which accomplishes the same thing as Microsoft's dual boot process. However, it's a lot simpler to set up.
What you are trying to do doesn't seem to add up. There is no purpose for having a bootable OS on a drive D since it could never be booted up. Your master hard drive can have up to three primary partitions, formatted to boot different versions of Windows, but only one can be active and bootable at a time. The other would be "hidden". Microsoft supports this under what is called a dual boot configuration. Setting up a dual boot config can be a little complicated. Assuming you have XP installed already, check out the following link which describes the procedure to create a dual boot by adding ME to your C: drive. http://www.winxpfix.com/page5.htm#howwin982000 I would also check out other write-ups on Google.
What's your plan for the 130GB drive (will you keep it or retire it)?
Your XP primary partition would be an NTFS but the ME will have to be FAT32. When visible each would be your C: drive. After you get the two primary partitions set up, you must create an extended partition with at least two logical drives (say D: and E
. One will be a FAT32 the other NTFS. When you boot to XP it will be able to see and use both, however, ME will only be able to access the FAT32 drive. If you need to share files between XP and ME the FAT32 drive would be the place for them.The Partition Magic product, available from Symantec, comes bundled with a product called BootMagic which accomplishes the same thing as Microsoft's dual boot process. However, it's a lot simpler to set up.
