How do I dual boot XP Pro and XP MCE

January 1, 2007 4:30 PM

I bought an Alienware Aurora laptop a couple months ago which I configured with Windows Media Center Edition. everything has been working great and I like MCE but I have started to do some recording of music and it seems that hardware and software in the recording world is almost universally incompatible with MCE, so I bought XP Pro and I want to dual boot the two of them, I made a 10GB partition and put Pro on there, it runs but explore seems real slow, and I have to switch the primary boot partition from inside windows using a disk manager program and its a pain, I want to dual boot from startup, any tips? Thank you!
posted by BodieRyan to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Windows MCE 2005 is Windows XP. Just a special XP.
posted by JayRwv at 4:47 PM on January 1, 2007

I am sorry that I left out part of my reply MCE 2005 is Windows XP PRO.
posted by JayRwv at 4:54 PM on January 1, 2007

There should be nothing special in MCE that hinder you from running a certain program.

Like JayRwv said, XP MCE is just XP Pro SP2, with a special MCE app and a few related services. I can't see how a program will not run on MCE that will run on XP. What program are you trying to use. You can try stopping the MCE services (I believe there are 3) and seeing if your program will run.
posted by mphuie at 1:10 AM on January 2, 2007

Uhhh... I can fix that... just, uh, send me the laptop...yeah, that's the ticket...and I'll get it back to you as soon as I'm done with it, I mean fixing it, yeah... just as soon as I can...

(sorry - no solution, I'm just really jealous of your laptop.
There is some 3rd party software for manipulating your MBR and HD partitions, though. Partition Magic comes to mind.)
posted by bashos_frog at 11:21 AM on January 2, 2007

Buy a cheap copy of Partition Magic 8, and use the included PQ Boot program as your new bootloader. The bootloader will allow you to boot different versions of Windows, and it will even password protect boot options if you tell it to.

It also lets you assign the default OS if none is selected, and the delay for such.

Sort of like GRUB, but sans Linux.
posted by SlyBevel at 8:20 PM on January 2, 2007

Which leads me to a slight derail:

Do any Linux geeks out there know a way to install and use Grub without also having to install a Linux distro?

Because the answer to that question would solve the original problem as well.

(Or, BodieRyan, you could Google up yourself an answer to the above, and there you have it; Robert's your father's brother.)

Here's a good place to start.
posted by SlyBevel at 8:34 PM on January 2, 2007

Took a minute to poke around at Grub.

In answer to my own question and yours, I give you WinGrub.

Happy New Year.
posted by SlyBevel at 1:25 PM on January 3, 2007