dual booting ME & W2K off separate drives

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I've just installed ME on one hard drive and W2K Pro on another. My question
deals with drive letter configuations. Both Drives are Western Digitals.
Drive 1 is 13.6 G. Drive 2 is 80 G. Drive 2 was partitioned into a pair of
10G drives and one 60G drive (numbers rounded). When I boot up into the
different systems, here's what the computer sees. (a: is 3.5 drive for both)

Booting up in ME
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
F: CD-ROM
G: CD-DVD

Booting up in W2K Pro
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
G: CD-ROM
H: CD-DVD

Drive 2 with W2K Pro is NTFS. Drive 1 with W2K is FAT32. I know ME doesn't
recognize NTFS, so I understand why when the system is in ME mode it won't
see Drive 2.
My concern is having having different drive letters between the two OS. Only
C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters differ depending on
the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down the road? I'm still in the
"rebuilding" process for both drives (started over, reformatted drives,
installed ME first, installed W2K Pro second) and I've run into a few
glitches (browser freezes up trying to go to second page using Explorer 6)
but again, I haven't finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help or
advice would be greatly appreciated.
System:
A7V8X-X Motherboard
AMD 2200 Athlon CPU
1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)
Internet via Cable Modem
 
Hi, Staggerlee.

You might want to take a look at a couple of KB articles:
Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows Assign Drive Letters
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/51978/EN-US/

How Windows 2000 Assigns, Reserves, and Stores Drive Letters
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234048/EN-US/

As the WinXP Pro Resource Kit says, "Windows XP Professional and Windows
2000 assign drive letters differently from how Windows 98, Windows Me, and
Windows NT 4.0 assign drive letters. Therefore, if the computer starts
multiple operating systems, the drive letters might vary depending on which
operating system is running."
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkb_cnc_vzqu.asp

(I can't always get the URL for a specific page in the RK, so you may have
to drill down to:
Welcome > Part II Desktop Management > Ch 12 Disk Management > Managing
Volumes During Windows XP Professional Setup> Creating Volumes During
Windows XP Professional Setup)

See if these references explain what you are seeing.

Of course, only we humans will be confused with different drive letters
between the two Windows versions. But we will be booted into only one
version at a time, and the Windows we are running at the time will not be
confused, since it will have no idea what letters the other version might
have assigned. As you probably know, you can change drive letters, except
for the System and Boot volumes, by using Device Manager in WinME and Disk
Management in Win2K. If you specifically assign letters, Windows will
attempt to use those same letters persistently; otherwise, letters are
assigned anew each time you reboot, based on the hardware configuration at
that time, in the orders explained in the KB articles.

You did not tell us whether all of your volumes are primary partitions or
whether some are logical drives in extended partitions. It makes a
difference in the order in which letters are assigned. You also did not say
which partition on each drive is marked Active (bootable).

You also did not specifically say that you are using the dual-boot method
built into Win2K. With this method, common to all NT-type versions of
Windows (WinNT4/2K/XP), there is only one System Partition for the computer,
plus a Boot Volume for each Windows installation. The boot process always
starts on the System Partition (typically Drive C:), then branches to
whichever volume holds the Windows version selected from the opening menu.

As you can see from the plain-text file, C:\boot.ini, the computer locates
Win2K by rdisk(#)partition(#), rather than by drive letter. Rdisk(#) is the
physical drive number, starting with zero; partition(#) starts with one on
each HD. So the single partition on your first HD would be
rdisk(0)partition(1). The first partition on your second HD would be
rdisk(1)partition(1), but WinME is not located by this reference. The last
line in C:\boot.ini should be:
C:\="Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition"
or something similar. The label inside the quotes doesn't matter to the
computer; it is there only to provide the text for the opening menu so that
we humans will know which menu item is WinME. When we select WinME, it uses
C:\msdos.sys to locate and load WinME, just as if we were booting into a
WinME-only computer.

You may want to rethink your partition lineup to make it easier on yourself.
When I was dual-booting Win98 and WinXP, I created a small primary partition
at the front of my first HD and formatted it FAT(16) for maximum
compatibility. The rest of my HD became an extended partition, divided into
logical drives. When I added a second HD, I made it all an extended
partition with logical drives (except for a very small primary partition at
the beginning, which I can use for booting if the first HD fails). So long
as I continued to run Win98, I kept all my volumes formatted FAT, so that I
could access them from either Windows version. (After retiring Win98, I
converted all the logical drives to NTFS.) I installed Win98 into
E:\Windows, then installed Win2K into D:\WinNT; D: and E: were logical
drives on HDD0, my first physical drive. Over the years, logical drives
have come and gone, but I still use the same basic pattern: C: is the
System Partition; D: is my main Windows version (now WinXP); other volumes
contain my programs, data, other operating systems (such as a parallel
installation of WinXP, Longhorn), and whatever I feel like putting there. I
keep letters for CD/DVD drives, USB "thumb" drives, cameras, etc., further
out in the alphabet (S:, V:, W:, etc.) to avoid having to change HD volume
letters when something gets added or removed. I much prefer using DM
(Device Manager or Disk Management) to assign letters that suit me than
settling for "the luck of the draw".

RC
 
It's because the boot record is on one drive only. A small technical
note here: your drives are actually HDD0 and HDD1. Usually the boot
info is on HDD0, what you refer as Hard Drive 1. When you installed W2k
the active partition on HDD0 was already used by ME and W2K used the
active partition on HDD1 and assigned it drive letter D because C was
already used, follows a simple logic. Whether or not this will cause
any problems is somewhat debatable, it doesn't really matter all that
much but it makes it annoying and a bit more confusing to maintain the
operating system when it doesn't reside on C.

Personally I have found that the easiest way to tackle the problem is to
install the operating systems to their respective drives while the other
drive is unplugged or turned off in the BIOS, then use a third party
boot manager to load the operating system. Your operating systems will
be on drive C but the rest of your drive letter assignments will still
be illogical in your thinking but not so in the thinking of the
operating system. For example, W2K will see itself on drive C on the
drive where it is installed but will probably see ME on the other drive
as drive D, because of the active status of the drive. ME of course
wont see the NTFS drives so the drive letter assignments won't seem so
out of whack. As to the CD/DVD drive letters they will be different on
both OS but they will or should take their letter assignment after the
hard drive partitions.

John
 
Thanks for the information. In answer to the primary/logical drive question,
the 13G drive is all primary. On the 80G, the first 10G is the primary while
the other 10G and the 60G parts are logical drives. I'm also using W2K to
manage the dual booting. My main reason for the split was to keep my programs
and things I use on one complete drive while my kids older programs that
won't run on W2K reside elsewhere. My fear at this point is having to
rearrange everything after I managed to get both systems working. I think
I'll be fine as long as the computer knows what it's doing depending on which
system I'm working on. I guess I just want to make sure that any "automatic"
function (program installations, for example) will know where it's suppose to
go. I've continued working to get both system's back to normal, and so far so
good. I still, however, want to be sure I'm not setting myself up for a
bigger problem later (reinstalling all the stuff needed for both system ain't
fun).
Staggerlee
 
Thanks for the information. In answer to the primary/logical drive
question, the 13G drive is all primary. On the 80G, the first 10G is
the primary while the other 10G and the 60G parts are logical drives.
I'm also using W2K to manage the dual booting. My main reason for the
split was to keep my programs and things I use on one complete drive
while my kids older programs that won't run on W2K reside elsewhere.
My fear at this point is having to rearrange everything after I
managed to get both systems working. I think I'll be fine as long as
the computer knows what it's doing depending on which system I'm
working on. I guess I just want to make sure that any "automatic"
function (program installations, for example) will know where it's
suppose to go. I've continued working to get both system's back to
normal, and so far so good. I still, however, want to be sure I'm not
setting myself up for a bigger problem later (reinstalling all the
stuff needed for both system ain't fun).
Staggerlee
Click to expand...

You should not have any problems with the different drive letters. One
OS does not know about the other OS, same for the programs you install.
You can always change some of the drive letters in Windows 2000 using
Disk Administrator but it really isn't necessary.

Leonard Severt
Microsoft Enterprise Support
 
Couple of suggestions since I have learned from my teenagers

Option 1

If your bios supports it you can set each drive to boot as the primar
drive. This would require a reinstall on the 2nd drive so boot an
registry pointers are correct. This way, booted into the kids boo
there is nothing that can happen to your drive/OS/config. So i
booting the 2nd disk the first is set to 'not installed'.

Option 2

Partition Magic has a utility called Boot Magic. Once installed yo
can 'hide' the other drive so the kids can't access it. Only weaknes
to this software is if you have them booting the primary drive they ca
trash both boots by messing with c:

Just some thoughts :-


-
wandere
 
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