Win 2000/XP Pro Dual Boot Issues

[david]

Hello everyone,
I originally installed windows xp professional, and just a few hours ago I installed windows 2000 on another partition. Each OS has its own hard drive. I can access the hard drive with winXP on it from 2000 because both OS's are formatted in NTFS. Just a few minutes ago, I rebooted and at the dual boot menu, I chose windows xp professional, because that's the OS I wanted to enter. For some reason, at the bottom it mentioned something about "if you have any problems with boot press F8 to enter windows 2000 boot help..." or something to that affect. The boot up tells me that there is a corrupt file. I'm not sure if this is just because of windows 2000. What should I do. Could I simply to a repair installation? Any comments appreciated!
The error message is as follows....

"Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM ..." I'm so lost, why is windows 2000 interfering with xp? I know that I should have installed them the other way around (newest last), but I don't know enough about OSes to make a link to this problem. Please post any help you can!

Thank you so much,

Dave

 

[Praetor]

The boot up tells me that there is a corrupt file

What's the file?

 

[david]

Alright, so I rebooted and checked the error message. I'm still baffled as to why windows 2000 has anything to do with booting into xp pro. Further more, when I just unplugged the hard drive with windows 2000 on it, windows 2000 along with xp was still on the boot menu. Why!!?! Is there something that I'm missing? Why does the computer still recognize the os even though the HD its on no longer exists? Anyway, plEASE help!!

Incase you didn't already see the earlier correction, the error message is as reads...

"Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM ..." I'm so lost, why is windows 2000 interfering with xp? I know that I should have installed them the other way around (newest last), but I don't know enough about OSes to make a link to this problem. Please post any help you can!

Thank you
Dave

 

[Praetor]

\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM ..."

(assuming i'm not mistaken) ... you know the wondows password you use to logon? Well part of that is encrypted within \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM (the other half is in \SAM) ... are the passwords for the two OSes the same? Have you changed a password recently?