Pro & Home: Living Together

[Dreamscape]

Interesting problem in partitioning. I had Windows 95/98 for the longest time. Then I switched to XP, but did so on another partition. Windows98 remained the C: and XP Home took on D: and things were good. Now, I found XP Pro for a steal at twice the price and wish to put it into the mix, but not in any old way.

I want rid of 98. I never use it anymore. So, I'm gonna install XP Pro on the 98 partition and retain my XP Home so as to migrate it slowly over to XP Pro. Then clear XP Home to recover lost space.

The problem is, C: is my active primary partition. It holds the boot loader (boot.ini). The latter should not matter since XP Pro will rewrite the boot loader right? And the former should not matter since XP Pro will reside ont he active primary partition. So, I guess I answered my own question.

The best way would be to install XP Pro on the 98 partition, rewriting the filesystem and such. XP Pro will detect XP Home and install the boot loader (hopefully), then I can re-label XP Home as Z: or something so it will not interfere with programs when I eventually remove it.

Sound like a good plan?

[ktkendall]

I would just install XP pro and keep single boot system and sell my copy of XP home and spend that on some more memory, or vid card or something else to enhance my system. Don't see any benefit of dual booting XP home/pro... JMO

[Dreamscape]

I'm gonna install XP Pro on the 98 partition and retain my XP Home so as to migrate it slowly over to XP Pro. Then clear XP Home to recover lost space.

Unlike most, I actually have useful data on my computer, which would result in very bad things happening to me if I was to lose it.

But, that does make me think of another question. Where is the boot loader for XP stored? Is it on the MBR or on the active partition?

[ktkendall]

I've upgraded to XP pro from heme version and it went fine, just do it from windows utilizing setup.exe on the cdrom and it will ask U for upgrade or clean install. I apologize if I not getting your reasoning but it just seems simpler to just run xp pro upgrade over the xp home version and do whatever U like with that w98. But aside from my opinion of what I think I would do, your way looks good too...

[Iman74]

Dream,
You are making this more complicated than it needs to be. The best course of action is backup your data. Delete all partitions; then using XP Pro recreate partition(s), format, and load the OS. When complete, copy your data back over to the HDD.

[Dreamscape]

Well, I thought of doing an upgrade, but a few problems and little snags happen.

First, no down time: cannot afford it. Should something go awry in the upgrade and screw my existing partition, I would be SOL.

Second, if I delete the Windows 98 partition, this moves my Windows XP partition from D: to C:, which might cause some problems resulting in downtime. I could probably keep it as D: and have no C:, but why bother?

Third, Windows 98 is already the active partition. While it is a simple fdisking task to change that to make D: active, why bother?

Not everything can be solved the same way every time. And while upgrading is easy enough, like I said this is not a word processing or gaming machine. It is doing some serious data compiling. That is why I prefer to "migrate" from OS to OS instead of jumping. Installing XP Pro over top of Windows 98 addresses everything from bootloader to active partition to drive letters and just seems the better option for this situation, right? That is a brief glimpse into my reasoning.

[Iman74]

However, when upgrading versus doing a full new install, usually the problems happen more with upgrades rather than full installs. Yeah, you have some down time loading the OS but there might be a hell of a lot more down time when upgrading. Did you consider that it might get so bad that in the end you would have to format the HDD anyway? Also, if it came to that, then think of all the time and heartache you would have saved by simply doing a full install from scratch.

[reboot]

Everyone is making this WAY more complicated than it need be.
You want to dump 98, keep Home on D, and get Pro on C.
Easy.
Boot to the XP CD, and run setup.
When prompted, format C, and install Pro on C, don't select upgrade.
You don't WANT to delete C via DOS (or any other utility), just leave it. The XP Pro setup will look after the boot files.
You'll end up with a dual boot of Pro and Home, as the Pro installation will rewrite the MBR, boot.ini, ntldr, etc., during it's install.
XP doesn't care if there's an active partition on the drive or not, it's not like 98/DOS.

[ktkendall]

XP home to pro is not a buggy upgrade though, it was the smoothest upgrade I ever did.. XP home from WinME was a washout though...

[Iman74]

Does not mean it will not be buggy for someone else.