nolonemo
1
OK, my firm issues me a laptop, it's running Win98 and a bunch of stuff the firm puts on it. Aha, methinks, this is a much nicer laptop than my old IBM 560x, but Win98??. Also, I can't connect to my home network because of the Novell software the firm installs. So I partition the hard drive since there's lots of room and install Win2k on the second partition to dual boot, and put on all the stuff I want there. Works great. Win98 doesn't know the Win2k stuff is there and vice versa. Needless to say, the firm IS department doesn't know about this. 
Now I hear the firm will upgrade all the computers to XP. I guess that's OK because it may reduce the computers' annoying tendency to crash when its in Win98 mode. IS will rebuild each machine from scratch instead of just installing over the old install (although the firm's IS strikes me as sort of lame, they're not totally stupic). Problem is, this sort of screws my sweet little deal on the second partition.
So, when the time comes, I'll image my second partition using Ghost or Drive Image (I use the latter for imaging usually), remove the second partition, and innocently hand in the laptop for conversion.
But getting my old Win2k back on seems like it might be a little problematic. I want to do the same dual boot system because the firm will set up XP so I can't install anything on the machine (no admin rights for the peons).
I figure I can create the second partition by booting off a utility CD (thank you Solaris). And the I can copy the old image to the hard drive, from the DVD I'll burn it to. Then I figure I can boot using the Acronis recovery CD and restore the image to the second partition.
But how do I get the machine to go to a dual boot window at startup (since the XP boot files would be oblivious to the presence of Win2k on the machine since it was only put there as an image restore)? Maybe what I can do is to install Win2k clean after creating the second partition (I understand you can make a dual boot with XP work if you replace a couple of the XP boot files after the Win2k install) and then just restore the old Win2k image over that. Would that work?
Or is there dual-boot software that I can use that will not require me to have XP administrative privileges to set up?
Anyway, any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Remember I don't have XP privileges on this machine, so I can't do anything inside XP itself (except stuff like to replace files using NTFSDOS - I assume they're going to change over NTFS when they do the conversion). Also, this is not the situation where you install XP as a dual boot OS after Win2k is on the machine. Obviously IS wouldn't be too thrilled about that.
Thanks, all.
Nolo
Now I hear the firm will upgrade all the computers to XP. I guess that's OK because it may reduce the computers' annoying tendency to crash when its in Win98 mode. IS will rebuild each machine from scratch instead of just installing over the old install (although the firm's IS strikes me as sort of lame, they're not totally stupic). Problem is, this sort of screws my sweet little deal on the second partition.
So, when the time comes, I'll image my second partition using Ghost or Drive Image (I use the latter for imaging usually), remove the second partition, and innocently hand in the laptop for conversion.
But getting my old Win2k back on seems like it might be a little problematic. I want to do the same dual boot system because the firm will set up XP so I can't install anything on the machine (no admin rights for the peons).
I figure I can create the second partition by booting off a utility CD (thank you Solaris). And the I can copy the old image to the hard drive, from the DVD I'll burn it to. Then I figure I can boot using the Acronis recovery CD and restore the image to the second partition.
But how do I get the machine to go to a dual boot window at startup (since the XP boot files would be oblivious to the presence of Win2k on the machine since it was only put there as an image restore)? Maybe what I can do is to install Win2k clean after creating the second partition (I understand you can make a dual boot with XP work if you replace a couple of the XP boot files after the Win2k install) and then just restore the old Win2k image over that. Would that work?
Or is there dual-boot software that I can use that will not require me to have XP administrative privileges to set up?
Anyway, any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Remember I don't have XP privileges on this machine, so I can't do anything inside XP itself (except stuff like to replace files using NTFSDOS - I assume they're going to change over NTFS when they do the conversion). Also, this is not the situation where you install XP as a dual boot OS after Win2k is on the machine. Obviously IS wouldn't be too thrilled about that.
Thanks, all.
Nolo
