I read the full post @ pcbanter, here are some comments fwiw. Of course, I
have only a narrow picture of your situation, so bare w/ me if I make some
assumptions or try to read between the lines a little.
It *sounds* like you took an old HD from another system that had a bootable
installation of W2K, got a new system w/ XP, and now want to boot it in
addition to XP on that new system. In your frustration, you seem to have
had some success configuring it as a slave, if only to access the files.
What you really want is to be able to boot it as before. IOW, you want to
dual-boot the two OS's from your new system.
Assuming I've got the picture right, there are several problems here.
First, you can't normally just move one OS installation on hardware "A" and
stick it into another system w/ hardware "B" and expect it to work. There
are LOTS of differences, including motherboard, CPU, etc., that make a HUGE
difference, and can easily stop your system from booting. Remember, as part
of the original W2K installation, it was configure for drivers on that *old*
system. Those drivers may be incompatible w/ your new system. So it's no
surprise, other issues aside, that it wouldn't boot.
Second, let's assume that hardware was NOT an issue. Let's assume it was
100% compatible across both systems. That's not enough. You can't just
stick another HD on your system and expect it to boot. The Windows boot
loader doesn't work that way. In fact, each OS installation on each HD most
assurdly has it's own boot files, boot.ini, etc., and each probably is
defined as C:. On any given system, there can be only ONE set of boot
files! Those boot files can then point to one or more bootable OS
installations, across partitions on the same HD, or even other HDs (such as
your installation of W2K). But to be bootable, your XP installation's
boot.ini file (which has precendence being installed first, and probably on
the primary IDE channel) would have to be updated to point to the W2K
installation on the other HD.
But this is only half the battle. Another problem is that BOTH XP and W2K
are installed as C: Windows won't allow TWO or more partitions to be
assigned C:, and since there's no way to hide one partition from the other
so that this wouldn't be a problem, you have a dilemma. Not too mention,
you don't even have the luxury of booting the W2K partition as D: since it's
abound w/ C: references in the program files, registry, etc.
I can think of only two solutions. Either save the data files off W2K, and
reinstall it, thus it will be installed as D: and the boot files under C:
(XP) will be initialized to point to W2K and show up on the boot menu. The
other solution is to use a real boot manager, like BootIt NG. By using a
boot manager, you'll be able to *hide* one partition from the other so that
you don't have the multiple C: drive conflict. Whenever one is loaded, the
other is hidden. This is why we have boot managers!
But again, even if a boot manager solves the immediate problem of booting,
there's that nasty hardware issue. Under XP, it's possible, usually, to do
a repair installation, which makes minor modifications to the current
install to correct for hardware changes. This makes it much easier for
people who need to replace, say, a motherboard or CPU, without having to
reinstall the OS from scratch. Whether W2K is capable of a similar fix, I
don't know. But it might be worth investigating. But you'll never even get
that far without solving the boot management problem FIRST. You've got to
get the boot issue solved first, THEN address the hardware issue.
Another solution to the boot problem is using a product like Trios (
http://www.3dgameman.com/vr/romtec/trios2/video_review.htm ). This allows
you to switch bootable drives. It achieves through *physical* isolation
what a boot manager achieves through *logical* isolation. It has advantages
and disadvantages compared to a boot manager. Perhaps too much to enumerate
here, but some of them should be obvious.
HTH
Jim
