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Dual Boot Systems

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by m.carter

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Hi

Can you help me? I am attempting to dual boot a system with windows 2000,NT and XP. But I keep getting a "boot inaccessible device" message after I boot up in windows NT after accessing one of the other operating systems. If I reinstall windows NT, I can use it with no problems until I use one of the other operating systems, then If I boot up in windows NT, I get the dreaded blue screen of death with the Boot Inaccessiable message. Is there something I need to change in the boot.ini? I would really appreciate any fixes anybody could suggest because I do not know what I can do next.

Thanks for you help in advance

Cheers

7 replies

by joseph moore

Are the different operating systems on different partitions (C: drive, D: drive, E: drive) or the same one? The only guess I would have is, if they are all on the same partition, then it could be a NTFS version problem.
NT supports NTFS4
Windows 2000 supports NTFS5. I think XP does also.
So, if your drive is formatted at NTFS5, then I don't think NT will be able to read from it.

by cascom

Boot.ini in NT needs to be modified to show the XP entry in your boot menu. Unfortunately Mr Gates' group have deicded that you only need one of their OSs installed at a time with XP and just made the job of a support tech that much more difficult, now we have to have numerous PC scattered around the place to support the growing menagerie of Windoze releases......

Linux Rules ! ! !

by difster

The best way to dual/triple boot is to use a boot manager such as BootMagic by PowerQuest. It takes care of everything so you don't need to mess with the boot.ini file at all. In fact, if you set it up right, you'll have a different boot.ini file for each install. Just make sure you put each install on its own partition.

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