Dual Boot

[BOB IROC]

I currently have a system that has Windows XP Professional on one Harddrive and Windows XP 64 Professional on another. I want to set up a dual boot menu as it did not do it for me when I installed XP 64. Basically my Machine is this

Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Abit KN8 Ultra Nforce 4 Motherboard
Drive C = Mirror RAID of 120GB harddrives (XP Pro)
Drive D Single 120GB Harddrive (XP 64)

I attached a screenshot taken from Everest Home Edition scan of my Disk Drives. Hopefully that will help. I did not know how to insert an image into this post.

Currently my Boot.ini reads like this
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /usepmtimer

Since my XP 64 installation is on drive D, I did not know how to add the necessary lines to make it boot menu to reflect that information.

Everest states that my 2 RAID drives are on host 1 and have ID's of 0 and 2. My other 120GB harddrive is on Host 3 with an ID of 0. I have searched the internet and tried many edits to the boot.ini and have had no success. If you cannot get the image maybe someone can explain to me how to add it to this forum or I could email it to you if it would help. Thanks

[confus-ed]

..Since my XP 64 installation is on drive D, I did not know how to add the necessary lines to make it boot menu to reflect that information...

So how come it ended up on 'd' ? for any setup of any o/s it must've been able to see another drive & another operating system when you ran it, else it'd think it was on 'c' just like your like your xp install, as drive lettering is a matter of perspective ..

Take us through just how we ended up like this please (in terms of what got installed in what order etc), I'm having a hard time also fathoming your comments about what drives are attached to what host according to everest, something there most definitely doesn't make sense - can you check on those numberings ?

[BOB IROC]

Well I installed 32bit Windows XP first on Drive C and once I got that all squared away, I rebooted the machine and proceeded to install 64bit XP on the other drive. I loaded my 64bit SATA drivers using the disk I downloaded from ABIT and it recognized all my drives, but the install did not notify me of another version of Windows being installed like I thought it would. I selected my non-RAID drive and installed it. The install seemed to go fine, but when I rebooted my machine it went back to 32bit windows and did not prompt a boot menu. What have been doing is changing the boot order of my Harddrives in the BIOS to load 64bit windows and that is a pain in the a$$. What I cannot remember is how the 64bit install recognized my drive letters during the intitial install.
Physically my drive connections are like this. The 2 RAID drives are connected to SATA port 1 and 2 and the non RAID drive is connected to SATA 3. I have another harddrive connected to the USB port, but no OS is on there. That is just data. I guess I want to avoid starting over if I can becuase without a reliable antivirus application, I do not want to use 64bit windows as my primary OS.

[confus-ed]

I think you might be best advised to keep doing this via changing boot order, but I'm not completely sure what we've ended up with, can you see the raid from both installs ? (I'm thinking that's what's confused windoze setup)

& what do you mean you can't find a reliable 64bit AV product ?, they all have versions out now (that either run 'anyway' or are 64bit), I dunno about a free one tho' ..

[BOB IROC]

I would have to double check when I get off of work tonite, but I am pretty sure I can see the RAID drive from both installs.

& what do you mean you can't find a reliable 64bit AV product ?, they all have versions out now (that either run 'anyway' or are 64bit), I dunno about a free one tho' ..

Neither McAffee, Norton, TrendMicro have virusscan products that work on XP 64. I have an open license with Norton through work and their latest offerings do not support the 64bit OS. Every year Me and the other Network Admin get the home version of Norton Free from our Vendor and Norton 2006 does not support Xp 64. I contacted Microsoft and they said they do not support any antivirus solutions as of yet. There may be a couple out there, but they are from companies I never heard of. I also think AVG may have one, but I am not sure.

Thanks for the replies, I guess I will have to continue to go into my BIOS and change my boot order unless I redo my computer and get rid of the RAID. That may be the whole problem.

[geoscomp]

Most likely..windows 64 would have recognized the other install if you would have installed it on another partition on the same drive..but with bios boot order it didnt even see the other drive during install

[confus-ed]

..Neither McAffee, Norton, TrendMicro have virusscan products that work on XP 64..

Don't they .. ? Really ? I think they might well have 'corporate editions' out that do though ;) (which was what I meant).

As for this can you fix the multiboot bit ? I dunno 'really', multiboot isn't really really supported even though most windoze operating system's install routines merrily 'just do it', but I can't say I've ever tried to add a raid to such a setup - I think your problem lies in the fact that windoze can't necessarily see inside the array .. Maybe doing the installs first & then creating any raided volumes is what you need/ed to do ?

[geoscomp]

Both Avast free edition and the 64 bit version of NOD32 are available for windows64