Very Computer

If I already have Win Me and Win 2000 on the same unpartitioned hard drive,
can I do a clean and install (as Win 2000 did on Me) of Win XP Pro and have
all three OS's load up?
Or is partitioning a must?

Harnish

You can do this:

Yes. A clean install of XP will keep your current configurations. Yet, be
aware that if u unistall or delete win xp the MBR will need to be modified
cuz xp will be needed to boot.

Quote:> If I already have Win Me and Win 2000 on the same unpartitioned hard
drive,
> can I do a clean and install (as Win 2000 did on Me) of Win XP Pro and
have
> all three OS's load up?
> Or is partitioning a must?

> Harnish

Win2K and XP will conflict over ntldr and something else (I forget).

I have a suggestion for you to think about. Get BootIt Next Generation (aka BING) from www.terabyteunlimited.com. Use BING to resize your current partition and create three more for a total of four: one for each OS, one for BING and one for user data. Five, five partitions. :-)

Then do a clean install of Win2K and XP and leave ME on the original partition. Move your user data to the user data partition. Set up BING to boot each OS partition, hide the other partitions and make user data visible. User data must be FAT32 to be seen by ME. The win2K and XP partitions can be NTFS and make your files more private and secure.

I have a triple-boot of 2K/XPhome/XP Pro with User Data and BING all on one 20GB disk and BING manages things very well. It will even do a CD image of each partition. This makes backups independent of the OS.

If you want more detailed instructions, Patrick F. supports BING on an independent news server and I have saved one of his posts that describes this in more detail. BING has a bit of a learning curve if you've never used a boot/partition manager but once you get it setup it's forget it, use it.

--
Kent W. England, MS MVP for WinXP Networking

Your Windows Me and Windows 2000 installations are already conflicting if
they're installed to the same partition. You should always install different
Microsoft OSes to separate partitions. You can't really do anything about
the Me and 2000 installations, but definitely create a new partition for XP.

--
Mike Ketchen MS-MVP (XP)
Associate Expert
Expert Zone - www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone

Quote:> If I already have Win Me and Win 2000 on the same unpartitioned hard
drive,
> can I do a clean and install (as Win 2000 did on Me) of Win XP Pro and
have
> all three OS's load up?
> Or is partitioning a must?

> Harnish