HELP! I cloned XP on 2 partitions and XP is giving me AUTOCHK crash!

[DoesThisWork]

I have XP Pro on my PC. I want to keep 2 copies of XP. One for daily use and one for gaming. I have experience with grub so I thought I could just dual boot the xp by hiding one partition each time. Not so!

I used gParted to shrink my original NTFS partition and copy it to 2nd partition. So now I have 2 identical partitions. I hided my 1st partition. Set my 2nd partitions to boot (I want both of them to be C: and don't want to seeing each other). XP boots up with its splash screen and halted with the following error.

autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK

It appears that XP still remembers its partition number. I don't know why it do that and don't know how to get around it. I even followed the walkthrough as decribed here. I used win98 CD to fdisk/mbr. I ended up with a "missing operating system when trying to boot 2nd XP. I have to fix by logging back into to 1st XP's Recovery and fix the MBR. I then removed MountedDevices, clone again, and even changed BOOT.INI to point to partition 2. I still ended up with same error.

 

[DoesThisWork]

With more trials, I found that the XP boot sector always goes to the same partition's boot.ini. Even if it is hidden. I don't know why this is happening. I can make it work by editing the boot.ini to dual boot. But I still need to hide the partition. So I need an additional boot manager such as GRUB to hide my other partition. This is not good. Because I will have 2 levels of menu and 2 unpredictable situation (making mismatch choices in each menu).

It seems that the XP boot sector always points to the same boot loader. I even tried fixboot in Recovery Console and it does not fix it. I am out of ideas.

Anyone?