An interesting inadvertent dual boot

This is pretty long story, but to sum it all up, i tried upgrading from win2k to winxp but accidentally just installed winxp on the partition where I already had installed win2k. I realized this too late, finished the install, then booted up winxp. After re-installing several programs i restarted my computer where I saw that I had the option of booting into winxp OR win2k.

I was surprised to say the least...I had no idea that you could dual boot off the same partition. So is this supposed to happen or did I just accidentally pull off the impossible?

It's entirely possible, I've done it myself on occasion. I'm not saying it's really *good* for the computer, but there you have it.

--Stryfe

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Originally posted by Darksteel
.....So is this supposed to happen or did I just accidentally pull off the impossible?

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Knowing very little about either OS I'd say you just pulled off the impossible, it would never happen again in a milion years... :(

Of course I also know enough about computers to say nothing is impossible.....? :confused: :D

PS. I would imagine it would have to do with Win2k having a dual boot setup to begin with.....

I would have thought that it was because the old boot.ini file was modified rather than replaced and the previous option to boot to W2k is still in there.

Have a look at the boot.ini and see where the two options point to. Also, what do you end up with when you choose W2k option, XP or 2k?

emr

It's very easy to dual boot 2k and xp on the same partition, this is because 2k's "windows" directory is c:\winnt whereas xp's is c:\windows. One of the nicer things about dual booting those two ;)

Must make a hell of a mess though, both will still use the default docs and settings, program files etc. I would imagine.

Not an easy setup to work with I wouldn't have thought?

this is the same with dual booting dos and windows NT 4

or

Windows NT 4 and windows 2k

you can have it on the same aprtition in diffrent folders..

like windows 98 and windows nt, or windows 98 and windows 2k...

it also auto maticly setups the boot.ini file for dual booting for you