Hi Folks,
I have a DELL Dimension 9200 with 2 x 250GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration and 4GB of RAM running XP Pro.
I also have a non-RAID 500GB drive (but it is controlled by the RAID BIOS) and I want to install an XP Pro system on that drive. This will be purely for video and photo editing and will not be connected to the internet and will be non-RAID.
My question is this:
I have a second XP Pro CD, can I just boot from it and point to the new drive and install XP without "telling" the first system, or do I have to do a special install because it's the second system?
I'm hoping that when I boot from the first system it will recognise the other and give me the choice of which one I want to use.
Regards.

Let me try to get this straight: you have XP on the RAID disks and you want to put a copy of XP on the non RAID drive or are both to be on the same drive? I don't know about involving a RAID but XP should recognize that a copy of itself is on another drive or partition and create a bootloader menu that has an entry in each automatically just as long as the newer system is installed last. Does that answer your question?

The current XP Pro system is on the two 250GB RAID 0 drives and I want to install another XP Pro onto the 500GB drive which is non-RAID. It's partitioned and I'm going to put XP on the first partition, so from what you are saying, I don't need to do anything special because Windows will recognise what I've done and give me a choice of system to boot from.
That's great,
Thanks.

It should. If it doesn't you can always manually edit the boot file but we'll cross that bridge if we get there. Good luck and keep us posted.

Hi Folks,
Well, nothing is ever as simple as it seems!
I loaded my XP Pro boot CD and restarted the PC.
The BIOS loaded ok and there was lots of CD accessing etc, then a blue screen saying (something like) "Your PC has been shut down to protect your operating system". If this is the first time, try again (didn't work) else remove any drivers recently installed etc......etc... if it persists contact your vendor!!!
So to check out the CD, I loaded my PC as normal then put the CD in the drive.
It loaded ok and asked if I wanted to install or repair Windows, so I said Install.
It then said, the version already installed is newer than this CD, goodbye.
So back to square one!

What exactly did the blue screen say? One thing that you can do is to disconnect the RAID drives, install XP on the other drive, and then edit the boot file after reconnecting the other drives.

Can't remember the exact wording but pretty much what I said above.
Yes, I suppose I could disconnect the RAID drives and then install on the single drive, but what will happen when I reconnect and the BIOS finds two bootable partitions?

If you can specify which drive you want to be the default drive it will find that copy of XP and boot into that. More than likely it will continue to look to your new installation as the default boot up drive. The disadvantage to having the other drive disconnected when you install XP is that there will only be an entry for the new install but I can help you add an entry for the old install later. You might be able to load a menu that allows you to select which drive you want to boot into at run time.