Can i get back into Win 2000?

[SufferWell1396]

I installed Windows Me on my D:\ drive because i wanted to run it again, and i want to do a dual boot, Windows 2000 Professional is on my C:\ drive, Windows 2000 is the best when it comes to conserving memory, but my installation is partially damaged so Win Me is much more stable, but eats ram, is there a boot.ini i can get that has the configureations to give me these options??

[Paul Komski]

Are C and D on different hard drives or on different partitions on one hard drive?

Are they both primary partitions and which is the active partition?

[SufferWell1396]

Different Harddrives, Windows 2000 is installed on a 13 gig and Win Me on a 2 gig

[Fruss Tray Ted]

"but my installation is partially damaged "

Fix it or figure out if it is bad sectors or other problems with your drive.

You can boot to either drive if they are both attached as primary active masters IF you are there as they boot and are willing to make the changes needed to BIOS settings each time. But it this what you want?

[SufferWell1396]

my Compaq BIOS cannot be messed with very much, only really lets me detect IDE devices, and if its that complicated, thats really not what i wanted to do, i just wanted a boot.ini file that i could put on a floppy disk with NTLDR and NTDETECT so i could boot to which one tickeled my fancy

[SufferWell1396]

and the problem with Win 2000 isnt the drive, its the installation, for some reason it makes it if you put too much load on it (AIM, Mozilla Firefox/Opera, Windows Media Player, ect.) it will come up with a BSOD saying Cache Memory Dump. But it is still good to have to know that my memory is easily concerved, Win Me just eats memory

[Erik]

Why not do a fresh install then? There is defenitley something wrong there. It shouldn't crash because you open more than one application at a time, even if you do exceed your physical RAM. BTW only 256MB of RAM?? That isn't going to get you very far on either OS anyway.

If you do a fresh install of Windows 2000 to the existing Windows 2000 drive it should recognize Windows ME and create the proper boot.ini for you.

[Paul Komski]

If you do a fresh install of Windows 2000 to the existing Windows 2000 drive it should recognize Windows ME and create the proper boot.ini for you.

Not quite. It will only set up a dual boot menu if you install using the WinME partition as the system (active) partition - even if you put the Windows folder on another partition or hard drive.

You also cannott make an NT dual-boot floppy diskette until there is a Win2K boot sector on the WinME system partition and the original WinME bootsector has been transmuted into a bootsect.dos file.

Either install a new or repair Win2K installation using the WinME partition to kick of the process. You can do this from within WinME (but be sure to choose New installation and not the upgrade option) or by using a third party boot manager such as XOSL or BiNG.