PM 6 and ME/ W2K dual boot

[Brent]

I have bought Partition Magic 6 and will be getting Win 2000 soon. I want to dual boot ME and W2K. I have two hard drives, C and D, each with a single FAT 32 partition, C being active and primary and drive D formatted as non active extended fat single logical drive.
From what I can fathom out, if I chose to use FAT 32 for W2K, I can place "critical boot files" on the C drive sharing with ME, and the rest of W2K on the D drive???????

[SCompRacer]

This is what I did when I dual booted from single drives with partitions or even two drives.

Run Win2000 setup from ME and it will install a boot manager. After you pop in the CD, select the "Install a new copy of Win2000..." option.

After entering the Product Key, select Advanced Options from the next dialogue box. Enable "Copy all setup files from CD to dard Drive" and enable "I want to choose the install partition during setup." Then choose the drive you want Win2000 installed on.

After setup, the boot manager will give you a choice of op systems to boot from. Under Win2000, you can select which op system will appear at the top of the boot manager list and time allowed to make a choice.



[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 03 April 2001).]

[Brent]

I presume the boot manager you mention is the PM Boot Magic?
Also, no need to create extra partitions with my setup for FAT 32 dual boot?
BTW-I looked at the MS W2K support site and it told me that W2K only supports partitions up to 32GB under FAT 32. Seems that under NTFS it is 18 Terrabytes?
I thought that 98/ ME supported up to 2 Terrabytes under FAT 32.

[SCompRacer]

Win2000 will set up a boot manager when you run Win2000 setup from a running op system. I've never used PowerQuest Boot Magic so I haven't a clue there.

I've never used NTFS either, know just enough about it to be dangerous. As far as a limit with Win2000 and FAT32, I have it on a 90GB RAID 0 with no trouble. While it could be true, wouldn't be the first time there has been an error in some of MS documentation.

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 04 April 2001).]

[Sisyfos]

I think the 32 GB FAT32 limit in Win2K only applies to the Disk Manager. Ie Win2K can't create >32 GB partitions, but it can handle existing ones alright.

How this is tackled by SP1 or SP2 I don't know.

[arbymo]

Brent : sorry to dissapoint u .. but u don't need PM or any other 3rd parity boot managers to dual boot win2k/ME, as mentioned above .. win2k like NT has it's own boot manager which will let u choose which OS u wanna use and would detect it easly as long as it's an MS OS and add it to the boot menu, but of course u should install win9x/ME 1st then win2k/NT.
of course PM is a goog product and will come in handy for many situations where u wanna reconfigure ur drives.
about that 32 G limitation, i think it's win95 that's limited to 32 GB, 98 and later can go higher, read it some where on MS KB.
u can search for 32 GB or 32 limit on the knowledge base.

[Brent]

Thanks
OH......well at least I only bought the upgrade download.
Just to confirm, I can put W2K into my existing partitions?
Any real reason to consider NTFS over FAT32?

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Brent:
Any real reason to consider NTFS over FAT32?</font>

Security, manageability, and space efficiency. I'm sure M$FT has articles that describe the advantages in more details.