I had a windows 2000 os on my pc (AMD athlon) with 80GB HDD. recently i added a 320GB HDD and installed XP making the new HDD 0 the primary memory. Normally, when i switch on XP gets loaded but if i want to change this i go to the bios and in the boot sequence i enable HDD1 (secondary one containing 2000 OS) and windows 2000 gets loaded. My question is can i load windows 2000 of HDD1 using a bootable CD whenever i want instead of changing boot sequence everytime.

Thanx

Ideally, if you had slaved the new drive and installed XP, it would created a boot menu and you'd get to chose which OS to boot from.

I believe you can edit the boot.ini file on the Win2k drive and get this to work. Hang tight and I'm sure some will come along that can help more.

Actually you need only edit the boot.ini on one drive, the default.

EXAMPLE boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Note the "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect"

This is a 2nd OS hard drive, rdisk(1)
The "default" is your active boot drive that would contain its own boot.ini

Let say you boot to WinXP the majority of the time, make this the active "default" drive and modify boot.ini for dual boot.

In your case, boot to your Win2k drive and look/print its boot.ini, then boot to your default WinXP drive and edit the multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect line to match the Win2k boot.ini line (likely "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional")

If I am correct, you will get a the boot menu with 2 choices. By the way, you may want to increase the timeout.