Multiple Boot Computer

ORIGINAL: wogg

I have an existing harddrive with win2000. I setup a new harddrive with winXP.

The boot loader chioce menu is installed at the time of XP setup. In order for it to do this, it needs to see the Win2000 installation as you install. If you removed the Win200 drive prior to installing XP, it wouldn't have seen the OS and wouldn't have automatically installed the boot loader choices.

You can manually add OS choices to boot.ini through the system properties.
right click my computer and hit properties
Advanced tab
Startup and Recovery settings button

The OS lines look like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

You'd have to know which disk and partition numbers to assign. The text between the quotes is what will be displayed as the choice.

There are also utilities from the recovery console that will create the boot.ini file for you. The recovery console can be accessed by booting the XP disk. Using the command "help" gives you a list of commands, any of which can be run with a /? switch to see how to use them.

I'm not sure if the upgrade version of XP is limited in this regard, I think it's a full version with a few licensing tweaks to look for the older OS but I'm not sure.

ORIGINAL: wogg

The install looked for previous version of windows, but the only choice for the search was the CDrom drive. I had to show it the installation disk for win2000 before it let me continue. There was no way to show it the other harddrive for the previous version search.

Strange...

By chance is Win2000 installed on a SATA drive, or any type of HDD controller that required the "F6" tap to install a driver when Windows was installing? That would have done it... because XP wouldn't have seen that HDD without itself getting the "F6" tap and driver addition.

ORIGINAL: wogg

No, just ATA drives. They share the same cabling and jumpers set for master on each. Would that be an issue?

I have 2 IDE/ATA interfaces on the MB, one has the CDdrive direct. Should each harddrive have it's own interface and slave the CD to one of them?

If you have both HDD's on one cable and both set to master, yes... that's a problem. They can do some unpredictable things when jumpers are mixed up, including just plain not being detected at all.

I'd set your HDD's as masters, one on each channel, and slave the CDROM to one of them. I have a similar set of drives setup like this:
Primary IDE Master = HDD - OS installations
*I used partitions for dual booting, both XP pro installations, one for general use and internet, the other strictly for audio
Primary IDE Slave = DVD Burner
Secondary IDE Master = HDD - Audio recording drive, all by it's lonesome for best performance.