VistaPE

Success! Reformatted to NTFS, did the other things, reconnected both drives, and from my boot options function key it booted into VistaPE with networking. That's both comps sorted!

Thanks a million Mark

Spoke too soon. On second reboot it hung again, so IDE-0 and IDE-1 are conflicting.

I give up!

 

Earthling:

Great! You've got a good solution with VistaPE on a partition on your hard disk. That should be the best of both worlds for making and restoring images. Enjoy!

 

Just saw your edit. Could the problem be the propensity of Windows to prefer having only one bootable OS partition? I wonder what it modifies?

 

I'm going to swap the drives Master/Slavewise next. Worth a try, but involves some physical rearrangement.

Will be back. Too close to give up now.

 

Success - and this time it seems to be lasting, as it has survived two reboots into XP and back again.

I only tried this because a mate on another forum said some time ago that he'd had problems with a Mandriva/W2K dual boot until he switched the W2K drive to slave.

It does seem a bit arse about face having VistaPE and my backups partition on the primary and XP on the slave, but it's working so I'm gonna put the lid back on now. End of saga!