3 OS's (windows)

[chrismatheou]

hey i have got 4 hard drives and 2 cd drives i have 2 cd drives on the secondary ide channel and another 2 HD's on the primary channel. The other 2 HD's are connected via a controller card, every hardrive works and is connected properly and accessible through either of my dual boot windows which is 2k and Xp but when i try to install windows Me on another harddrive which i have done and try to get a selection for it on startup i cant get this, i have moved the drive with Windows Me on to different channels and it works by its self but i cant get it to work with the other too hard drives which already contain OS's i was wondering is there any way in which i can actually get Me to work and i am not botherd which IDE combination i use.
all my hardrives are 20gig

thanks in advance
chris

[SeanC]

I think with ME, you need to install that one before 2000 and XP. As 2000 and XP are later and greater OS's they would see ME. ME may not be seeing them though.

Sean

[chrismatheou]

but the thing is all the OS's are all on different HD's so would that wouldnt affect it right??
Is it actually possible to have 3 Microsoft OS's on one system??

[Xeroid]

Install the operating systems in the following order:
1. MS-DOS
2. Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me
3. Windows NT
4. Windows 2000
5. Windows XP

LINKAGE

Mike

You don't HAVE to install ME or 9X before 2K or XP, you would just have to run the Recovery Console to get the boot loader back.

ME or 9X HAVE to have the files needed to boot on your Primary, bootable (active) partition though. This is usually C:\ and it's gonna have to be formatted FAT32.

If you really wanted to save a headache, format your Primary/Active drive as FAT32 and install ME on it. We'll call this Drive 0.

Drive 1, I'd format FAT32, NTFS would work, but ME wouldn't be able to see. With it being 20GB's, FAT32 would perform better. Put 2K on it.

Drive 2, I'd format FAT32, same reason as above and put XP on it.

After XP is installed, it will have all three OS's in your "boot.ini" file which will give you something like this when it's booting . . .

Microsoft Windows XP Home/Professional
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Microsoft Windows <-- This is ME

You will have 30 seconds to choose which one you want to load.