Hi there, I am currently using an asus m2n sli deluxe mobo w/amd athlon
64x2(windsor)3800+ am2 socket cpu. I have a WD sata 150gb 3.0gb/s hard drive and plan on purchasing another.My question is this - Can I run xp64 and xp pro on seperate drives? do I have to set up a raid? will jbod work? or is this a completely different setup altogether? and will I have to use a virtual machine? also will this require a wipe and clean installation of my current hard drive? please say no because that would really suck!!! I know enough not to destroy my machine or system but still a little gray in this area. Thanx everyone for your help.

I don't see why it wouldn't be ok to run two versions of xp one 64 bit the other 32 bit on seperate drives. The problem is this...in order to install multibooting in windows you must install the oldest version first. That being the 32 bit xp version. then you would install the newest version (64 bit).

The way to get around this is to use a third party boot manager. I personally like 'BootIt NG" This allows you to install as many different operating systems as you would care to use...in any order...in as many disks that your system will handle (hardware) but up to like 200 partitions.(need to be partitioned by the program) And it has some neat utillities to go along with it.
Boot Manager, Partition Manager, and Drive Image Utility - BootIt Next Generation
been using it for years. It has a 30 day free trial if you would like to try it.

For arguments sake, I'd just like to say that since MS Virual Machine is now free, I'd suggest making an image of that and use it instead of dual booting. It's alot neater, and in future you can transfer the virtual image of XP to any other machine that has VM installed.

We use it at work for a couple of our clients...they'll have 1 super server (4 dual core cpus, 16gb ram, 2TB hard drive space...each running about 6 virtual servers)...works really well and if the server needs restarting, takes 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes