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XP and 2K on same drive

Posted May 2003 by Steve Sinchak

For those who have tried it you may have found it a little tricky installing XP and 2k in seperate partitions on a hard drive as they both make off with boot privleges, solution is simple and is as follows:

  • Get a copy of FDisk.exe (if you don't know where you probably shouldn't be attempting this procedure)

  • If necessary to the further procedures remove all your partitions (you WILL loose all your data so either back up or accept the impending doom about to befall your data)

  • create a primary partition on your drive I used 1gb its down to the size of your drive, only really needs to be a hundred mb or so.

  • mark the primary partition as active

  • create a secondary partion consuming the remaining spare space on your drive, and place into that 2 logical drives, with a size of whatever you want to allocate XP and 2k respectively.

  • format your partitions

  • install 2k into one of the secondary partitions and XP into the other secondary partition.

The primary partition acts a redundant partition and just ignore it, don't go reformatting it though! The above method relies on sufficient hard drive space, competance in fdisk and a little bit of brain. You may add any extra logical drives in that you wish to, just so long as you have one for each windows version and one as a redundant partition. If you keep your data in a seperate partition to your OS and program files I might suggest making the redundant partition your directory to store it to as it is primary you don't have to remove it to monkey about with other partitions in the future.

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