Seeking details for dual booting XP Home from either of 2 hard drives. The scenario is: Have 1 60Gb drive on the mainboard IDE connection, other 40Gb on an SCSI card connection (1 CD also each in IDE & SCSI). Have a mirror image of XP on the second, SCSI drive for backup and crash protection. I can boot to the second, SCSI drive if I disconnect the main IDE drive I normally boot from, but that's the only way. Trying PowerQuest BootMagic (also have PartitionMagic). PartitionMagic sees both drives, along with the small 50Mb partition I made on the backup SCSI drive where I installed BootMagic (as FAT32). BootMagic seems to not see the second XP installation on the backup drive as an OS. If I try an Add (and Advanced) in BootMagic, it sees the second drive but doesn't recognize an OS. Questions are: 1) Any way to get BootMagic to recognize the second drive OS? 2) Why would I not be able to boot from the second drive if I changed the boot sequence in the BIOS from first device as IDE0 to IDE1? Assume because it's actually on an SCSI connection? Would I be able to do so if I changed the drive connections for both to IDE with the 2 CD drives on SCSI, and if so would a bootable CD such as XP be picked up if on the SCSI instead of IDE? 3) Anything to do with the boot.ini lines? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Please coreect me if I'm wrong, but if the SCSI drive has a copy of XP that was simply ghosted from the IDE drive, then it will have a boot address containing information on booting XP that refers to disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1), which is not the address of your SCSI drive.

Try changing the Boot.ini file on the SCSI drive, but keep a copy of the original in another folder on the drive to back it up in case you need to start afresh.

You have to modify your BOOT.INI (on both partitions) to include the SCSII disk. See samples below (substitute NT with XP)

Some Examples where NT will boot from..

..the first hard disk on the first partition of first IDE/SCSI Controller
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"


..the first hard disk on the third partition of the second SCSI Controller
scsi(1)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="This description can be any you like"


Variable Description
Multi(n) For SCSI/IDE Controller (where n is initial set to 0 for the first controller)
SCSI(n) For SCSI Controller Without BIOS enabled (where n is initial set to 0 for the first controller)
disk(n) This options is for SCSI controller without SCSI BIOS. (n is usually always 0)
RDisk(n) Physical Hard Drive (where n is initial set to 0 for the first hard drive)
partition(n) Partition (where n is initial set to 1 for the first partition)