Dual booting Operating Systems & Partitioning & Installing Hard Disk Drives
1. Somewhere around 1994, I had a little mental stroke of bright light, and developed a plan to use separate partitions on a hard drive to allow more than one Operating System ( OS ) to be installed, with some additional interesting features. As Programs rarely blow up compared to Operating Systems, Programs would be placed on separate partitions away from the OS'es. After researching the matter further I Found I could save a incredible amount of Drive space by installing Common Programs ( Netscape, MS Office, Photo Shop, etc. ) exactly on top of their selves from each Operating System on common partitions. This meant that when one operating System blew up I would just boot a different, working one and continue running Netscape, Office, Photo Shop, etc. until I had time to fix or do a fresh Install of the broken OS. Also with the benefit that when formatting a partition that the defective OS was on, I wouldn't loose any Mail, Bookmarks, Address book or Work as all these things were on a different, common partition for only programs .
2. Your newest drive is usually your fastest drive and should have your Operating Systems installed on it. We should use Windows 2000 for all our most critical Programs, except Games. Windows ME is know to be much weaker than Win 2000 but it runs virtually any game ever produced. Therefore I recommend installing both OS'es on their own separate partitions with Programs such as Netscape, MS Office, Photo Shop, etc. on a third partition.
3. Therefore first Install your new hard drive in BIOS as the primary master drive with no company ( such as a slave ) as it comes from the factory ( with a head configuration of 16 ). For the time being remove your old drive and store in a safe place. It has a primary active partition on it and it would take over Drive letter D: and mess things up if installed now. We will install it later, to let you retrieve your old mail and work, then Delete and Re-Partition it for Games, Programs, etc. With older computer BIOS don't get excited if your drive only shows up as 8 gig in BIOS until you get into Windows 2000's partitioning program where it should show the actual larger size. I partition my new 30 gig or larger drives as follows using my favorite partitioning program built in to Windows 2000 Installation (or after Win 2000 is installed I use diskmgmt.msc (on our desktop, See #4. below ) . I actually include one additional partition ( like E: 3 Gigs, making my last drive I: ) for investigating the new up coming Operating Systems, like MS Whistler.
C: Win2K 7 Gigabytes with Windows 2000 installed on it
D: ME 7 Gigabytes with Windows ME installed on it
E: Tests 7 Gigabytes with Windows XP and other beta Operating Systems
F: Progs #1 8 Gigabytes with Primary Applications like Office 2K, Photo Shop
G: Progs #2 8 Gigabytes with Copies of Operating Systems for installations and repairs and Primary Applications like Netscape Communicator, etc.
H: Split with I: for Virtual CD's
I: Split with H: for Virtual CD's
4. Boot the Windows 2000 CD from BIOS or the 4 boot Floppies and proceed with the installation. When you see the page showing your hard disk drives pause as this is the partition program where you can partition your new hard drive as above. Next pretend you are going to install Windows 2000 on the D: partition. Say no to NTFS and watch it format the drive. Immediately at the end of format press F3 twice exiting the installation. Now install Windows ME using #1 A instructions <<<here>>> . When finished next Install windows 2000 on the C: drive following windows 2000 instructions at #3 <<< here >>>. Now go to Start, Search, Files and locate diskmgmt.msc and drag it to Desktop and create a shortcut. Run this program and format and label, as above, the remaining Partitions using FAT32. Then change your CD Rom Drive letter to X:\ .
5. After installing both Operating Systems you will have a neat boot menu at start up allowing you to boot ( go to ) either OS. You may configure your new dual boot menu anytime by going to Win 2000, control panel, System, Start up-Shutdown and selecting the normal default boot system and time delay.
6. Now you may install your old original hard drive ( preferably on the Secondary IDE Channel with your CD ROM ) and boot Windows 2000. Be careful now as your original old drives C: Partition temporarily shows up as Your D: and any other D: , E: and other partitions from the old drive will follow at the end of the new drive. Now carefully copy any old work, mail, etc. from the old drive to New Partitions on the new drive. Next using diskmgmt.msc (on our desktop, See #4. above ) we must delete all partitions on our old drive and create one new EXTENDED partition the entire size of drive. And then create logical partitions in this extended partition, formatting and labeling them. After doing this, and Re-Booting, the second drive will not take drive letter D: , messing everything up. Your Computer will be a organized pleasure to run when you only have one C: drive, with a primary partition. When adding your third and fourth drives, Remember that they should only contain extended partitions ! Make sure your CD ROM is drive letter X: in both operating systems.
7. Next Install your Programs from each Operating System as follows. Start by installing MS Office from Windows 2000. When prompted take a custom installation and Browse to change the partition to install to. In the example above, Office would try to install to C:\Program Files\MS Office. Browse and only change the drive letter from C to E , with out changing any directories. I.E. E:\Program Files\MS Office. Document where each Program is installed for now and the future as when formatting a partition that had a broken OS, after re-installing the OS you will have to re-install the programs in exactly the same drive and directory so that they will be entered in the re-installed Operating System's registry to run properly, many older games don't require registry entries, but the newer ones do. When finished Re-Start Computer and boot ME. Now Again from ME install MS Office. It will suggest D:\Program Files\MS Office but change it to the same place you installed it the last time I. E. E:\Program Files\MS Office. I suggest, from experience, to only change the drive letter as every time you do this you must have exactly the same directory or you will waste twice the drive space and your Office work from each different Operating System will not appear the same. Now do this with Netscape. When you finish, when you surf and e-mail from either Operating System you won't notice anything different as the Bookmark, Mail and Address folders are all on the same common directory, on a Program drive.