Help me set up my Dual Boot please.

[Lonman]

I want to set up a dual boot with Win2k (primary partition) and XP (secondary partition).

I have a 45 gig hard drive with a large logical storage partition that i want to leave alone. It takes up about half the drive right now.

I want the cleanest possible boot partition. I've read a few things about fdisk /mbr. Can I quick format my boot partition and do a fdisk /mbr - will this give me a clean boot partition while preserving my extended partition, or would i lose my extended partition?

The reason i'm asking is because i'm not familiar with fdisk /mbr and/or exactly what it does.

Any help would be appreciated, thx.

 

[decon]

after you installed win2k, just pop XP cd into the cdrom and install. it will create the dual boot win2k and XP for ya.... you dont have to do anything... I'm currently run win2k and XP + winME

 

[Lonman]

after you installed win2k, just pop XP cd into the cdrom and install. it will create the dual boot win2k and XP for ya.... you dont have to do anything... I'm currently run win2k and XP + winME

Thx for the reply.

I'm familiar with dual booting, i've done it in the past. I've edited my initial post to make my questions a little clearer.

My main question is, if I use the command "fdisk /mbr," will i lose my extended partition?

Sorry for any confusion.

________________________

Update: "fdisk /mbr" did not destroy my extended partition. I'm currently getting Win2k up to speed. I've created my XP partition and formatted it to NTFS. As soon as I do some testing in 2k i'll be installing XP.

 

[Lonman]

Thx for the info Alec,

Up and running on both now. Installed 2K on a large 21+ gig Fat32 partition. I reduced my page file, ran defrag, installed partition magic and gave this primary boot partition 2 gig and then installed XP on the remainder (choosing the full NTFS format option). The only reason i have another OS at all is a fail-safe feature. If XP dies I can access this NTFS volume with 2k to retrieve the stuff i can't afford to lose. I set my bootloader to 3 seconds and hid my C:\ drive using Tweak UI. Hopefully, I'll never have to use 2K, but it's there in case of an emergency.

Now I'll get all my base programs installed and burn an image with PowerQuest's Disk Image 5.0 (I don't have Ghost) as another fail-safe feature. "Redundancy Rocks!" I believe I read from a trusted source - oh yeah, that APK dude said that, lol.

I'm set