Win Xp Pro And Xp Mce

[tlither]

Never tried this but was curious if it would work. I really don't want to reformat for XP MCE but might swap drives if I can't run both with a dual boot setup. Any suggestions? Anyone tried it? I currently have three hard drives in my system so swapping them around to run MCE isn't much of a problem. Is MCE much different from XP PRO? I mainly want it for transferring stuff to my xbox (and to the PC if possible). Let me know if I can do this.

 

[Odessa 086]

I think it's possible. (should be, if you can dual boot XP with Vista as well) If you don't see boot options after restart, install a boot loader into either of the systems. Media Center is not very different to XP Pro. Basically, it IS XP Pro plus extensions for handling multimedia Pro may not have. Media Center is more for your average home consumer, so it focuses a lot more on multimedia, whereas Pro tries to have a little bit of everything, focusing mainly on effectiveness of everyday tasks for both home users and businesses.

You can definitely install both systems (technically, there is nothing to prevent you from doing this, as long as you have more than one partition), but as I said, there may be an issue of not being given the option of choosing which system to boot in upon restart. But this is solved by installing a boot loader into your primary system.

 

[Toby]

hmm, not sure, I've never heard of dual booting xp & xp, which is different than vista + xp or linux + xp.

sort of pointless, because xp is xp (duh!). so if you're not a "pro" aka. system administrator, the difference between xp home and xp pro is the color of the booting progress bar (ie. not much). MCE is xp pro with a few features. maybe, you can install mce over xp pro without losing data.

not sure though. but vista supports MCE features, so you could use xp + vista ^^

 

[Odessa 086]

Hell, I'm tempted to try it right now even though I reinstalled only two days ago. I love tinkering with systems. TF makes a point, though...why not use MC only and leave Pro out of it? Because it does appear to have everything Pro does, plus a few more things. I have Pro myself, used to have MC.
I'm assuming you keep your documents on a different partition, and not on one where Windows is installed. In which case I'd advise what TF said - format the Pro partition and install MC on it instead. It's kind of easier, and saves you the time you'd spend on rebooting and switching between systems, especially if MC has everything you normally use in Pro.

 

[Toby]

I'd also try it out, but I haven't got any spare PCs hanging around (switched to VMware ).

So I asked some colleagues down from the tech department. They have done it before, but with Acronis True Image, basically it's important that the booloader doesn't get messed up. seems you can do it: support.microsoft.com. looks messy...

 

[Odessa 086]

I use EasyBCD bootloader for dual booting both Windows+Linux systems and Windows+Windows. Worked great for me so far, nothing ever went wrong.

 

[Spawn Camp3r]

the simple answer is yes, you can. first step would be to partition your hardrive, or get another one. then install media center on one then pro on the other. then every time you start up you chose which one you want to boot up with. note that you can be running them at the same time.

however in my opinion the better route to go is media center x64 bit, then you really don't need pro. or if you don't have a problem with vista try to get vista ultimate which contains media center and comes in x64 bit.

 

[Odessa 086]

All Premium Vistas have Media Center. I have Home Premium. But something tells me he isn't after Vista.

 

[BFDesigns]

It'd be pretty easy to do. All the computers in the CAD lab at my school have a dual boot with 2 copies of XP on them - we had virus problems last year and the only way to solve them was to re-image the entire system and install a new copy of XP on them.

Just make sure that you're not trying to do it with a new HP computer. There's something about the way they did the BIOS that is just plain nasty (you install XP onto a Vista system as a dual boot and it comes up saying that there is no Hard Drive detected even though the damned thing has a 250GB drive!). HP computers are really nice cuz they're cheap, have nice graphics capabilities (I think they're still partnered with NVidea) and are very easy to operate in general. However, Phoenix Technologies - the guys that wrote the BIOS for HP - really dropped the ball on this one!

 

[tlither]

Thanks folks. I have Vista on another machine but don't care for it. Of course it's a bottom of the line box. I may just have to install MCE next week over my XP Pro. I appreciate the comments.

 

[Toby]

however in my opinion the better route to go is media center x64 bit, then you really don't need pro.

dear god, no, xp 64bit was awful. starts with driver support and continues.

BFDesigns: only solution? there is no such thing! btw, "solution"... seems more of a hack to me.

anyway, the point of this pointless post: stop people even thinking about installing xp 64bit, and tlither, if you do, keep us updated! the tech department guys are quite eager to hear what happens ^^

 

[BFDesigns]

dear god, no, xp 64bit was awful. starts with driver support and continues.

BFDesigns: only solution? there is no such thing! btw, "solution"... seems more of a hack to me.

anyway, the point of this pointless post: stop people even thinking about installing xp 64bit, and tlither, if you do, keep us updated! the tech department guys are quite eager to hear what happens ^^

BIOS (BI-Operating-System) exists. The ones on Dell computers seem to work incredibly well... but you do not want to get stuck in Dell Hell!

Oh yeah, and it's not a hack if you get a Staples Tech to do it! Basically it involved them partitioning off a section of the Hard Drive (cut it right down the middle) and loading the operating system onto the partition that does not have the initial OS on it. So I have one 250GB Hard Disks that register as 2 109GB separate units (the space discrepancy was the partition for the recovery, so it really registers as 3 disks from 1 unit).

 

[tlither]

Here's what I think I'll do. Move anything important off my boot drive. Repartition it (into about 3 partitions), fire up MCE, and install on one partition. See what happens. Cuss, have a beer while it installs, wait, hope it works. If that fails, I'll repartition the drive again and install MCE clean. I'll let ya know how it goes.

BTW - it's not a mainstream system. I built it myself. I WON'T buy a prebuilt system period. I know what works for me and unless it's Alienware, it won't work for me. I can't afford them so I build my own and have for the last 15 years.

 

[Odessa 086]

It'd be pretty easy to do. All the computers in the CAD lab at my school have a dual boot with 2 copies of XP on them - we had virus problems last year and the only way to solve them was to re-image the entire system and install a new copy of XP on them.

Just make sure that you're not trying to do it with a new HP computer. There's something about the way they did the BIOS that is just plain nasty (you install XP onto a Vista system as a dual boot and it comes up saying that there is no Hard Drive detected even though the damned thing has a 250GB drive!). HP computers are really nice cuz they're cheap, have nice graphics capabilities (I think they're still partnered with NVidea) and are very easy to operate in general. However, Phoenix Technologies - the guys that wrote the BIOS for HP - really dropped the ball on this one!

Whatwhatwhat? Are you sure? Because my HP Pavilion Slimline is dual-booting XP and Vista like a charm.

 

[Toby]

Here's what I think I'll do. Move anything important off my boot drive. Repartition it (into about 3 partitions), fire up MCE, and install on one partition. See what happens. Cuss, have a beer while it installs, wait, hope it works. If that fails, I'll repartition the drive again and install MCE clean. I'll let ya know how it goes.

excellent idea, except the beer part: one probably isn't enough takes quite a while.

EDIT: just ignore this post if it seems to complicated. it's not necessary, just might make you're life easier.

top tip: get a knoppix live cd (linux which runs of a cd) or the qparted live cd. qparted is a free linux based partition manager which can shrink and grow partitions. excellent thing. just remember to defrag before you try and resize! here's a walk through if you're interested. don't know why xp can't resize partitions....

BIOS (BI-Operating-System) exists. The ones on Dell computers seem to work incredibly well... but you do not want to get stuck in Dell Hell!

Oh yeah, and it's not a hack if you get a Staples Tech to do it!

I know, it's just that if you have a virus problem, you normally just nuke the hdd and revert to an older backup image (like with acronis or vmware). as soon as it's not you're pc or you're dealing with more than one pc, you normally separate data from os & windows.