Two MBR's in Multiboot system

[ChromWolf]

A guy in class said he was having problems with his multi-boot system; on one hard drive, he's got a WinXP home and WinXP Pro dualboot. On a second HD, he's got a single WinXP Pro install. He wanted it to be a triple-boot to WinXP Pro (1), WinXP Pro (2), and WinXP Home. ....I'm guessing he had to unhook the Home/Pro dualboot HD to get the second install of Pro to even work, which is what is causing his problem---he's got two MBR's.

Is it possible to have both HD's hooked up, boot off either the home or pro CD, and remove the extra MBR/repair what should be the normal MBR to do this, or must he remove the active partition on the 2nd XP Pro HD and start over? It seemed to me the "fixmbr" command from the Recovery Console would be the logical step, but I don't know how it would handle two MBR's, or if it would correctly (or even at all) recreate the MBR's the way they should be.

He's already expecting that he'll hafta get any wanted data off the 2nd XP Pro HD, but I just figured I'd ask in case there was something we were missing.

[Digitalic]

I`m guessing from what info you gave that he started with a drive configured for a XP Home\XP Pro dual boot and tried to add a hard drive that had XP Pro installed as a single boot, or visa\versa. The 2 active primary partitions shouldn`t cause a problem as well as the 2 mbrs. The mbr typically resides on the first sector of the primary hard drive and that`s where the bios will look and not on another slaved drive. I`ve often pulled a drive containing an operable OS and slaved it to my computer or with an external USB to access files, make repairs, etc. without any boot problems. However, the OS on the slave drive could not be operated.

I would suggest saving any data on the XP Pro version that he wants as XP Pro2, frmatting the drive and after it`s installed as a slave or on another channel, doing a clean install and configuring a multi boot XP Home\XP Pro\XPPro2.

edit: I just wanted to mention that the /mbr switch is not recommended in certain dual boot situations.