Dual Boot ME and XP on 2 Drives

[Powertrip]

Hello All,

I have added a second hard drive to my system and installed XP home on it. (master drive)

I disconnected the previous drive during the xp install and the reconnected the ME disk as a slave afterwards.

XP boots by default with no option to boot ME, however I can view my ME files from XP's explorer.

I also can set the BOIS to boot the ME (IDE1) with no problems.

I tried to add the ME drive and partition to boot.ini file so I get a prompt when i boot up, and I do get a prompt but when it starts to boot ME I get an error.

BOOT.INI Contents:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\Windows="Windows ME (Old No Video Drivers)" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Error when I try to boot ME OS:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt" \system32\hal.dll

ME still boots fine if I tell the BIOS to boot the slave drive 1st though.

Is this a NTFS/FAT32 issue or am I doing something wrong with my boot.ini?

[glc]

You need to put that ME drive back in as the master - then install XP on the second drive by booting with the CD. This will set up the boot menu properly for you. This is the correct procedure for setting up a dual boot.

[Powertrip]

Bummer, I'll know for next time GLC. Not sure why I always unhook the old OS 1st seems that I lost an install of 98 once but I probably put it on the wrong partition when setting up the drives in the 16 bit portion of the XP install.