4 XP Partitions (Two XP Home Editions and Two Professional Editions) One Hdd All Work

I have 2 XP HOME EDITIONS (one of which is a copy of the original factory installed software bundle) and two versions of xp PRO (one with SP2 on the Microsoft disk and an older one pre SP2).

​

On this E MACHINE the original software will not allow itself to be installed via DD10 in the normal way as IT ALWAYS DELETES the entire drive and then reinstalls itself. The only "work around" is to COPY the entire partition and on this machine the "copy partition" proceedure works very well.

​

After install the two XP PRO partitions allow only a hybrid "DD10/Windows bootloader". If I use the windows boot loader it does not boot into two of the partitions ( one a HOME version and the other a PRO edition).

​

If I choose the "press Esc for menu" option at boot up OS SELECTOR appears and I can choose any of the 4 partitions to boot into!! (All 4 XP partitions are recognized and work well if chosen by "OS SELECTOR" {Idid have to reactivate it with the rescue media}). IF I don't choose the "press Esc for menu" option at boot time then it waits about 5 seconds and shows the Windows boot loader with 6 "partitions" to boot into. Two of these partitions are written identically as partition 2 and partition 3 (one is a Home edition the other a Pro edition).

​

Later I corrected this by going to msconfig and using the "check all boot paths" button in the boot.ini tab to delete the added lines to boot.ini (this feature did identify partition 2 and 3 as having invalid boot paths). Caution is necessary here as it also identified the "Copied partition" as having an invalid boot path (as this is a copy its boot.ini is a clone of the original XP HOME partition boot.ini file). I really don't like to Choose which boot.ini lines are incorrect as any mistakes can be catastrophic. DD10 should be able to handle adding OS's with out duplicating boot.ini lines complicating things that require messing with the guts of any version of Windows. I would have left them there but I want to add more OS's and am wary of what problems would occur if these boot.ini entries were left intact. Convoluted results but ultimately they did work.

 

p.s. All of these XPs work without them being "HIDDEN " from each other, which is the way I wanted them. I was't sure this could be done but this proves that it could (at lease on this machine).