Hi, for years, I was moving/copying Win XP Home PARTITIONS around. Just edit boot.ini accordingly. Now, I am (trying) to set up a NEW system in the same manner with XP Pro. MULTIPLE partitions  XP Pro for different purposes. I ended up in STRANGE situations. An installation resides on part 2. But, I have to start it with part 3 entered in boot.ini. !!?? Part 3 on this disk is an empty NTFS Partition. When I copy an installation into part 3 with the setting  for that partition, it does not boot at all.  On part 4 is another installation, that works with the correct settings. The setup what I am looking for is 1st Part DOS Fat 16 with boot manager, 2nd XP pro, 3rd XP Pro; 4th XP Pro. The boot manager hides the partitions who are not used. I do not want to install into each partition XP from scratch and reenter all settings and install all common programs gain and again. For me it looks like, that something has changed or is different with Win XP Pro. Does anybody know? Thanks!
No MATTER where you install XP or which partition you choose it is always going to write certain files to the root directory of C:...
So the empty NTFS partition must have been C: when XP was installed.
There is no way around this.