>I am setting up a laptop to dual boot seperate installations of XP Pro.
I> have installed XP Pro to the first partition, which half of the total hard drive space
>I am installing all the basic, common stuff to this windows installation, java, adobe, adobe reader, shockwave and all windows updates.
My plan is to then make an image of this partition with acronis and then restore it back to the unformatted partition, giving me two installations of XP Pro, saving me the trouble of doing all the updates, and other comnon software installations.
There are a couple of things I'm not sure of:
1. How to get a menu, asking which installation to boot to?
is it a simple matter of editing the boot.ini on the c drive?
2.Do I need to get the MBR and another boot.ini to the second logical drive?
3. Will duplicating the initial installation of the first partition to the second partition allow Windows to work properly on the second partition?
One thing I've considered to take care of #1 above is to start an istallation of Windows just to let it take care of the dual boot menu thing. Then just taking my image and overwriting that partition with a copy of the first partition.