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Sohag asked me a question : I want to know from you one thing. Say, I have two Windows (xp) operating systems in two different drives (one in C drive, other in D drive) in my pc. I choose from the start-up screen which windows to enter. In case of any problem, If i format and re-install the windows of C drive, how will it be possible for me to get it again on the startup screen as was before? After formatting and re-installing Windows, will both windows automatically appear on start-up screen? or I have to manually do something to get it there?

Why do you need another computer when you are looking for a alternative to windows vista? There is always a option to install two operating systems in one computer and its called Dual-Boot using which you can run full fledged more than 1 operating system in the same computer which are going to be installed on different hard disk drives. If you are running apple macbook laptop then you have a preinstalled called ‘Bootcamp’ which you can use and install a windows based operating system in the same OSX/Leopard based system. You dont need any special hardware like RAM or processor to run a dual-boot operating system based computer because any PC would work great if it has the minimum configuration to handle these operating systems.

Dual Booting is a feature where in you install two separate operating systems in the same computer, which may be on two partitions on the same hard drive or two different hard disk drives on the same computer. In this specific case there were two operating systems already installed on the computer on different partitions ie C Drive & D Drive with both being Windows XP. In this case we need to work out on the post installation options where we want to setup the dual boot option in the boot.ini file because once the hard disk was formatted the file would contain only the freshly installed operating system details and the other ones boot statement would be missing.

The first step would be to right click on your ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop and going to ‘Properties’ and after that in the ‘System Properties’ box select the settings option under ‘Startup and Recovery’ menu.

Once you click on this you will be shown a list of Booting options which you can select as default while the booting lists appear on the first computer start up screen. Click on the ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Startup and Recovery’box and you will find a new notepad opened with this kind of information :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Now the above startup code appears on PC’s with just 1 operating system with C Drive being the default drive for bootup, but you can add another extra line like this to the above code and try to detect the another operating system which is also installed on your computer, in this case another Windows XP.

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Old” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

You can give any name to the other operating system because the code allows us to give any kind of display names for these operating systems and you can save the file after adding the above line of code. Then in the drop down menu you can select the default boot up operating system and also change the operating system selection’s list display time and display recovery options time from 30seconds to anything you wish.

Its always important to take a backup of this specific boot.ini file and make sure to restore it in case any problem arises. You always need to take care of the codes because these are the most important data of your computer without which it would not load and you may need to format the hard disk drive and reinstall the operating system in case of problems.