Parallel Installation of W2K3

I want to perform a parallel installation of W2K3. The second installation
will be installed on a separate, mirrored partition. The orginal is also
installed on a mirrored partition. I found the article "How to perfrom a
parallel installation of ..." (266465). However, it does not answer these
questions:

How do I configure the server to boot to the second installation?
How do I configure the server to boot to the orginal installation?
Do I need to edit the orginal installation's boot.ini?
How do I safely remove one of the installations?

Any articles, procedures, or advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Dean Phelps

Parallel installs are not recommended anymore for recovery purposes since
there are many tools available now for recovery. With that said, here is a
glossy overview.

Lets say you are using IDE drives
Scenerio 1
Two drives as set0 on controller0. Two drives as set1 on controller1. Set
the bios to boot the first set. Install. Set the bios to boot the second
set. Install.
Whichever primary drive you set the bios to will be the booting system.
They are independent of each other.

Scenerio 2
You have 4 drives in the system. Install 1 sets up your first install.
Install 2 does your second install. Both installs are booted via the
boot.ini choice. So when you want to boot the second install you choose the
2nd upon startup. Problem here is if you lose/corrupt disk1 you lost both
boots.

> How do I configure the server to boot to the second installation? Answered above
> How do I configure the server to boot to the orginal installation? Answered above
> Do I need to edit the orginal installation's boot.ini? No
> How do I safely remove one of the installations? From one install wipe the disks of the other install. Then remove the entry from the boot.ini if doing scenerio 2

Having done several "parallel" installations for troubleshooting purposes my
experience was that installing the "second" copy from within the "first" OS
the original boot.ini file was automatically modified and listed both OSs -
providing boot choice.

according to some literature I have reviewed instances of a parallel
installation both OSs interact with the My Documents and Program Files
folders - which I did not experience,

"Dean at Idaho Tax" <> wrote in
message news:74839556-EA32-4A84-8F35-...
>I want to perform a parallel installation of W2K3. The second installation
> will be installed on a separate, mirrored partition. The orginal is also
> installed on a mirrored partition. I found the article "How to perfrom a
> parallel installation of ..." (266465). However, it does not answer these
> questions:
>
> How do I configure the server to boot to the second installation?
> How do I configure the server to boot to the orginal installation?
> Do I need to edit the orginal installation's boot.ini?
> How do I safely remove one of the installations?
>
> Any articles, procedures, or advice is greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> Dean Phelps

Usually you never install a OS via another OS or you can run into many
problems. I would highly suggest you only do clean installs ie. boot up via
cdrom boot and do both installs that way.

The results of shared My documents and settings is when you install two
instances to the same partition. Never a good idea. Problem also exists but
worse when you clone one install to another drive/partition. Things like
program registry entries or the fact the clone points to the pagefile of the
original is a problem.