Dual boot WinXP and Win2k3?
 

I'm going to be testing Wink2k3 for the company I work for next week and was wondering how I would do a dual boot with xp pro and win2k3? I plan on installing xp pro on my primary hard drive and win2k3 on my second hard drive. Does it matter which one I install first?

i dont know much help you are going to get since not many people have tried out win 2k3.

i say install winxp first on the partition, and 2k3 on the other one.

agreed. i think it's usually recommended to install the newest OS last

I've been toiling with Win2k3 since RC1, and it's actually pretty neat. As far as dual booting goes, the following process has worked for me:

- Clean install of XP on C: Partition. Install all the apps you need and make it pretty, etc.

- Boot to the Win2k3 Server CD, it will detect your WinXP installation and grumble a bit, but as long as you install the NOS to a completely different drive letter (i.e. D), :) you'll be fine.

Dual booting isn't nearly as haphazard as it was with NT 4.0; the only real thing you have to be careful of is installing apps to the C: drive when you're working within 2k3 Srvr. This shouldn't happen at all with properly written apps which base their install path on System Environment Variables, but a lot of crappy applications are hard-coded to install to C:\Program Files\blah blah blah.

Hope this helps.

If you install Win2k after XP you may not be able to boot into XP. To fix that just boot into Win2k, put your XP cd in and find ntldr from the XP cd and copy it into your c drive. After that you'll be ok to boot into either OS.

I've done it. It's not problem at all. Since WinXP, Win2k, and Win 2k3 are all based on the same kernel, when you install multiple OS's, the boot.ini file gets appended with the path to each new instance. This is why it's very important that you always install on different partitions when you're considering running with dual bootstraps.

Just to reiterate, I've run XP and Windows 2003 Server dual booting of the same machine before, and it's cake (actually it was XP, Win2k3, and Debian, woo hoo nerd prize for me!). I'm currently dual booting Win2k and WinXP on my work machine (and not by choice, my network is rather... fucked up) and have not had any issues.

That NOW was supposed to be a NOT. God damn malfunctioning pinky.

I never mix Production and Testing. Even if dual boot works fine, I'd recommend either a VM (like VMWare) or getting a second hard drive with removable bay.

It's a few extra $ with no reconfigurations or opportunities to mess up your personal system.

Er, newbie here - is Win2k3 Longhorn? Or some other Windows version I have just never heard of?

- w2k3 is a _server_ os, basically like a new w2k server.

Longhorn, as i understand, is going to be the 'new' XP...a workstation OS.

I was sent 2003 server by MS. Should I bother with it? I'm currently running XP Pro, and although I do run a home network, a server version of Windows isn't really important. But I wouldn't mind learning it. Thoughts? It has a 180 day time limit. But that's no big deal.

Wyodiver: If you're looking for a home OS, don't go for one of the 2003 Beta versions. They don't run all home apps you may want (trillian being one of them).