My nephew had a 40 gig HD with Win ME. I installed a 120 gig HD as a master and loaded Win XP pro on it and installed all his programs on it. I set his old HD as a slave. It still has the WIN ME OS and his programes installed.

For some reason he wants to be able to run from his old drive "mabey- sometime". so I didn't format it. I showed him how to switch the cables to set the old HD as a master if he wants to run Win ME and his old system.

Is there a way to switch to the slave with the ME system when he turns the computer on without switching cables to boot from the old, HD?

erkanady

Hi erkanady, welcome to SAF

You can invert the startup priority on your BIOS setup.

Chris

I thought about that, but I'd feel safer with him switching cables than havining him mess with any settings. He tends to play around then forgets what he did. After all, he's only 57 years old.

Thanks, Ed

Your better bet would have been to keep the original drive in place with ME on it (Primary Master). Install the second drive, then install XP to the second drive. Boot with the CD and you'll get an option to install to the newer partition. This will create a boot screen wherein he can select which OS he wants to boot to at the beginning. The boot.ini file is modifiable to make the XP install the default OS if desired.

Thanks, I think I follow that. Is the boot.ini modifiedautomatically or is it done manually?

Ed

It can be done manually with notepad (the file is hidden, so you'll have to unhide the system files), or from the System Properties page (Startup and Recovery section, or something like that. I'm not in XP at the moment.) The file is on the C: drive (root).

Thanks again, I'll give him the options. I really don't understand why he would ever want to run ME from his second drive since all his programs are running fine under XP on his new , larger drive. I'd rather clean up the old drive and use it to store back up files.He just called and he's having memory troubles. Apparently he installed an extra 512 of memory that the guy at Best Buy told him was ok for his computer and something isn't right. I hope it's not like the time he had printer problems and I had to explain that if he wanted to print out a web page in color he had to have ink in the color cartrige.

Thanks again, Ed

Hi Ed, you are welcome.

Try to explain and show him that WinXP will run as he wants. If you have any problem with this, please post back.

Chris.