Here's the stat's: 1. PC (C:\) hard drive is running XP Home with a recovery partition (D:\). (first drive on master IDE slot cable) 2. Slave hard drive (E:\) has no OS & only 1 partition. (second drive on master IDE slot cable) 3. CD/DVD drive (F:\) (First & only drive on secondary IDE slot cable) 4. External Sata hard drive with USB connection. Has XP Pro on it. Recognized in Disk Management but recognized as "Dynamic" + "Foreign" with no volume data. 5. Motherboard has no SATA connections. A: You can't access data from an XP pro drive in an XP Home OS. That's why the drive is being designated as "Foreign" and no volume data. B: I still need the data from the "Foreign" external drive and I need to use the machine running XP Home to do it. Too much data on the drive to burn CD/DVD's at another machine. I want to do a direct copy to slave drive (E:\). Before I do this, and maybe waste my time, I thought I'd run it by the group of knowledge here. 1. I want to load XP Pro on drive C: for a dual boot. That would allow me to access the External SATA drive for data recovery. 2. Once I have the data off the external I will format the drive and load Win 2K on it. It will still be used as an external, but I will want to boot from it at startup? I know how to load the OS's and set up the machine for boot choices at startup. I'd like to know if these 3 different OS's on 2 drives (1 being external USB) will give me any problems? Thanks
Why? What's the point Dan? The dual boot is easy but I am trying to understand the rationalization ofr 2k, xp home and XP Pro. What's the point of 3 OS's? I can see a dual boot with XP Pro and Windows7. If you have a Riser card for SATA it's going to be difficult due to when the drivers load. Before I go there. Just help me conceptualize what you are trying to accomplish.
Aside from my obvious question of if you have Pro why bother with Home, the only issue I would see is actually getting a pc that old to actually boot from an external USB connection. If it were a newer PC that had a BIOS option of booting from a USB device that would be different.
The dual xp pro and home is so I can keep the existing setup on the PC. I don't want to reload all the software that's on the XP home setup. It has all my diagnostic prog's, my circuit board cad program, serial programing ap's, etc.. It's one of my my bench PC's. I just want to get the data off the XP Pro drive. That's the only reason for the XP Pro boot. I may remove XP Pro after the copy, but I'll leave it if it doesn't hurt performance. My dedicated 2K machine died and I was hoping to incorporate it's operation in the XP Home machine. Wiping the sata drive and loading Win2K will be strictly for an AutoCad program that won't exceed 2K as an OS. I have updated versions of AutoCad but I hate all the bells and whistle BS they've added. I like the KISS version. You zoom in and expand quite a bit in CAD. Isolate the older program on a bare bones OS setup and you increase speed. No internet, no security, no other programs. Add using the drives large capacity as virtual memory and it gets a little better. I won't have a riser card, the BIOS will boot USB external.
If you just need to grab the data from the XP Pro drive, download a boot CD like Hiren's or Ultimate Boot CD, burn it, and boot from it with the external drive connected. You will be able to work with the contents of the drive. Trev
Great idea, I totally forgot about accessing the drive data from the boot!! So now I'll only have 2 OS's, and I know that works just fine. Thanks for the help all.
What about booting to a Windows 7 Ultimate CD. Go to System Recovery Options and use the Command Line interface to access your other drive?
That's an option, but command line copying specific files & directories would take forever. I used the Ultimate CD program today and had a explorer window style copy process that allowed picking all the specific files at once. I've got it up and running both OS's (2K & XP Home) with no prob's and my data saved.
