Dual Boot Me with 2000 on 2nd Hard drive?

[John Prophet]

Ok Ive already got Me on a 30G Drive. I have a spare 2,5G drive that I can use. What is the best way to do a dual boot WITHOUT messing with my Me system at all. I suppose going with NTFS would be best to keep the drives from interacting. When I had the drive installed earlier , I noticed that ME would automatically use the 2nd drive for part of the restore function. Is there any way to do this without 3rd party programs. What I would like is too have a choice at bootup of which system to use. Thanks....

[Comtech]

Pull the drive with ME on it.
Put the other drive in as primary master.
Fdisk, make active and format the drive.
Put it back as slave (or secondary master), and install the ME drive as primary master.
Insert the Win2k disk, start the install, and choose NOT to upgrade, and specify the second drive for install under NTFS.
Win2k will put the boot loader on for you, so you have the choice of OS, and ME won't be touched. ME will also NOT be able to "see" the NTFS drive, so no "_Restore" folder will appear. Win2k will be able to "see" the ME drive though.

[This message has been edited by Comtech (edited 07-20-2001).]

[John Prophet]

Thanks..you make it sound easy hehe. The only thing that gives me pause is that I dont know a lot about "restore" cdroms as far as the difference between them and full install cdroms, so Im not exactly sure what kind of "security blanket" I have if I should accidently mess up my ME somehow.
PS. I have a friend up in Trail BC..seems that is near you somewhat..saw a postcard..nice looking country.

[Comtech]

The "_restore" I'm talking about is what ME puts on all your drives as a hidden folder. Don't worry about it during the install, and it is as easy as I mentioned.

[edwelly]

I don't see any real reason to format usings NTFS. Why not use FAT32 and let them see each other. I had NO problems doing that with Win98 and Win2000. Just a thought...
---erik

[Comtech]

Good thought. I was just thinking that one MAY want to keep one OS completely separate from another, but it's jut a matter of choice. win2k will run better on NTFS than FAT32 (IMHO)...

[NDC]

Speed wise, FAT32 will run slightly faster than NTFS since it doesn't have features such as security, compression, etc. I run the OS partition on FAT32 for recovery reasons and run the other partitions on NTFS for security reasons...