Unless things have changed since 2000 you don't need to put onto diferent partitions and you don't need to hide anything. Not impossible but i doubt it as its all really just Windows NT at heart, just updated - a lot!
Yes the "boot" does happen from drive C *BUT* this boots up the loader which gives you the option of choosing which installaition to run. You can have multiple XP installs in the same partition:
C:\winxp
c:\winxp2
c:\windowsxp
e.t.c.
Yes, you can also then have more as
d:\winxp
d:\winxp2
etc
When the PC boots it will run the boostrap for XP which detects multiple installs listed inside the boot.ini file and then offer you a choice of which to load.
Once you have chose which to use permanently you can then edit (manually) the boot.ini using the instructions i listed in my first post. In here you can remove the installs you don't want to keep, from the menu system. When you have only one listed in this boot.ini it *should* not present you with the menu again. Make sure you change the default to match the install you wish to keep
Once you are confident of which you want to keep you can then free up space by deleting the xp directories you don't want to keep.
Now for applications:
Not recommended for "best practices" but ive done it more than several times and even used it to setup multiple environments on company pcs:
You have
c:\xp1
c:\xp2
c:\program files\"apps"
You will need to install all your apps for each operating system you wish to use them with. In the example above, twice. There is
NO NEED to have an c:\program files\"apps2" - but you can of course have it if you have the space. This is done to ensure, among other things, various files are copied into the windows system folders, ini/cfgs are created correctly and the registry is updated. All you do here is when installing the new copy of Office for example, just tell it the directory where the current version of Office is installed.
As it sounds like you are new to this sort of thing Lisa I cannot stress strongly enough that you ghost this or do some other sort of off-disk backup i.e. not on the disk you are using.
Be sure before you start that you know how to recover that system and that you have tested it as much as you can before you actually start experimenting.
Now, remember also that your new installaitions need to have a diferent computer name (maybe name it after the directory you install too?). This is so that the "My documents" and Profiles are kept seperate from each other. You really don't want all those nt profile files all getting mixed up and messing each other up
