keith.bauder,
Welcome to the board.
“I am just starting to set up a dual boot on my windows 7 computer. The computer has two hard drives. I plan on one being the windows 7 and the older IEDE drive to be the 2000. My question is when starting the install of 2000, the system wants to format the other drive as well because it has a system it does not recognize.”
Yes I would go ahead and let Windows 2000 format the second drive.
Alternatively you could use a self booting disk with a partition utility on it to delete whatever is on the second hard disk. You can do that with the disc below or you can make a Ubuntu install disc and boot into live mode and use the Gparted partition editor that is built-in free with every Ubuntu install disc.
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7636
“Should I allow it to do this and if I do. Will I have install all of my programs again when I repair Windows 7?”
You may have to fix the MBR on the first hard disk to get back in the window seven. You won’t have to reinstall any programs however.
To get access back to Windows 7 you want to use a Windows 7 recovery disk or of course you can use the Windows 7 install this if you happen to have one. Instructions for making the disc are here:
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5399
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7567
If you can get Windows 2000 to install and boot, Easy BCD can set the boot entry for it easily. However I suspect you’re going to have difficulty getting Windows 2000 installed and running. I just build a new system and I couldn’t get Windows 2000 to boot. What I ended up doing was slipstreaming service pack four into the disc. I researched the procedure on how to do it with Windows XP. The same procedures work on Windows 2000.
I also figure out how to make itself booting. The self booting step isn’t necessary but it was really cool.
I utilized information from the links below to do the slipstream thing.
Steps 1-4:
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/showcase/slipstreaming-windows-xp-with-service-pack-2-sp2.aspx
Then because I didn’t have any the paid burner software I followed the steps below.
http://www.howtohaven.com/system/slipstream-xp-service-pack-3.shtml
Under the section labeled “Create the ImgBurn Project Configuration File” follow the steps absolutely exactly including the name of the folder on the hard drive. And I mean absolutely exactly! When I tried to get cute and name the project on the hard disk something like W2k, I made a coaster.
As an aside can I ask why you want to boot Windows 2000? The only reason I wanted to do it was to run an old game of Risk. After all of the above I discovered that the video drivers are not available for most of the video cards In computers these days for Windows 2000. Without the video drivers you are stuck at 800 by 600 by 16 colors. So I recommend you check what video drivers you can get for your video card for Windows 2000 before attempting it unless you are happy to run at the lower video resolution.
