Dual Boot or Installing 2 OS?!

[Smokin32]

I'm having trouble installing XP Pro and XP64 on 2 separate hard drives.

Originally, I installed XP64 on its own drive and ran it perfectly. After a short while I discovered that some important hardware would not work (no drivers), so I ended up installing XP Pro on another drive. It was great I had the best of both worlds, I could go into bios and boot from specific drives and things ran very smoothly for me that way. Each OS when booted up was a C: drive.

Anyway, time has passed and I eventually formated one drive and been using XP pro, I want to get the original setup I had back , but cant seem to figure out how. I tried installing XP64 into a formatted drive (about 5 times now) . It installs fine, but when I try to boot I get two weird situations.

The first situation I got was a dual boot, where if I boot from the drive I use for XP Pro, it will ask me if I want to run XP or XP64. If I choose XP64, the booting drive is on C: , and the XP 64 and all the programs are on D: instead of what I expected and wanted, which was for XP64 to run and act like it was the only OS on the computer.

The second situation was to try and boot from my second drive (The one with XP64 installed on it), and I got a NTLDR is missing. I looked up what I can do about that and after some promps I still failed(I don't know what drive my CD ROM is on). Instead I went into partition magic, was able to see the same files on XP Pro's drive (NTDLR & NTDETECT.Com)and I just copied and pasted them onto to XP64 drive. That worked in so much I was able to boot the drive, however the drive letters and assignments were all screwed up. XP pro was still not recognized as drive C:. I tried reassigning the drive letter via Regedit, but that only made me reinstall windows yet again.

HELP! It was so easy the first time I did it, whats going on?

Lil info, I have one SATA drive a WD raptor I want to run XP64, the other is a IDE drive with XP pro on it.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

It appears as if originally you used BIOS to select which partition or HD to boot, but after reinstalling you are now using the Windows boot manager. You can check its contents in the C:\boot.ini file.

Basically the Windows boot manager is a very simple thing, and it always shows all partitions as active.

You mention Partition Magic; PM has its own boot manager, Boot Magic, and it performs the same way as your initial method: every OS you boot is on the C: drive; the other partitions are hidden. Why don't you use Boot Magic for that purpose?