dual booting ME & W2K off separate drives

I've just installed ME on one hard drive and W2K Pro on another. My question
deals with drive letter configuations. Both Drives are Western Digitals.
Drive 1 is 13.6 G. Drive 2 is 80 G. Drive 2 was partitioned into a pair of
10G drives and one 60G drive (numbers rounded). When I boot up into the
different systems, here's what the computer sees. (a: is 3.5 drive for both)

Booting up in ME
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
F: CD-ROM
G: CD-DVD

Booting up in W2K Pro
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
G: CD-ROM
H: CD-DVD

Drive 2 with W2K Pro is NTFS. Drive 1 with W2K is FAT32. I know ME doesn't
recognize NTFS, so I understand why when the system is in ME mode it won't
see Drive 2.
My concern is having having different drive letters between the two OS. Only
C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters differ depending on
the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down the road? I'm still in the
"rebuilding" process for both drives (started over, reformatted drives,
installed ME first, installed W2K Pro second) and I've run into a few
glitches (browser freezes up trying to go to second page using Explorer 6)
but again, I haven't finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help or
advice would be greatly appreciated.
System:
A7V8X-X Motherboard
AMD 2200 Athlon CPU
1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)
Internet via Cable Modem

Just a couple of comments.

Yout CD-ROM and DVD drive letters can both be changed on both systems so
there is no reason why they should not therefore have the same drive
letter reafgrdless of the OS in use. Personally I always move the drive
letters for my removable storage away from those if my hard disk
partitions. For example on this box that also multi-boots, I have my
drives as R (CD-RW), V (DVD player) and W (DVD writer).

Personally however I use a third party boot manager (BootIt NG) and prefer
to keep my system partitions hidden from each other. I find this makes it
just a little easier for me as my drive letter assignment is then the same
regardless of the OS I am using. However the only problem that might
occur by a drive having a different letter when using a different
operating system is any confusion you might have, I would expect the
system to have none.
--
Mike Maltby MS-MVP



staggerlee228 wrote:

I've just installed ME on one hard drive and W2K Pro on another. My
question deals with drive letter configuations. Both Drives are
Western Digitals. Drive 1 is 13.6 G. Drive 2 is 80 G. Drive 2 was
partitioned into a pair of 10G drives and one 60G drive (numbers
rounded). When I boot up into the different systems, here's what the
computer sees. (a: is 3.5 drive for both)

Booting up in ME
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
F: CD-ROM
G: CD-DVD

Booting up in W2K Pro
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
G: CD-ROM
H: CD-DVD

Drive 2 with W2K Pro is NTFS. Drive 1 with W2K is FAT32. I know ME
doesn't recognize NTFS, so I understand why when the system is in ME
mode it won't see Drive 2.
My concern is having having different drive letters between the two
OS. Only C: is common to both drives. All the other drive letters
differ depending on the OS i'm using. Will this cause problems down
the road? I'm still in the "rebuilding" process for both drives
(started over, reformatted drives, installed ME first, installed W2K
Pro second) and I've run into a few glitches (browser freezes up
trying to go to second page using Explorer 6) but again, I haven't
finished all the updates, reloads, ect ... Any help or advice would
be greatly appreciated.
System:
A7V8X-X Motherboard
AMD 2200 Athlon CPU
1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)
Internet via Cable Modem

You could fdisk/format the ntfs drives as fat32, that way both OSes would
see the same thing.

Other than that, unless you have an external device that needs to access
your machine, the only problem I imagine would be keeping it straight in
your head.

BTW, you *don't* need to limit your memory to 512MB in WinME, just the
vcache parameter in systems.ini


Rick
and it still annoys me that even though my LS drive is accessible as A: I
can't tell the OS that my optical drive is B:



"=?Utf-8?B?c3RhZ2dlcmxlZTIyOA==?="
wrote in
:


Booting up in ME
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: Unused 10G part of Drive 2.
E: Unused 60G part of Drive 2.
F: CD-ROM
G: CD-DVD

Booting up in W2K Pro
C: Win Me on 10G part of Drive 2
D: W2K Pro on Drive 1
E: Unused 10G part of Drive 2
F: Unused 60G part of Drive 2
G: CD-ROM
H: CD-DVD


1048 K of Ram (already limited to 512 in ME)