Duel booting with an existing OS

Hi there,

I have windows XP installed on my C drive and I have a removeable disk that had win98 and is assigned to drive D. I want to duel boot these OS's in the Loader, but I cant seem to get it to work. I have tried putting in d:\"Windows 98" in the boot.ini but it doesnt work. I have also tried the bootcfg command in the XP recovery console but its doesnt seem to detect the win98 install. So I am currently forced to change the boot drive in the bios to boot W98. If anyone can help me out here I would be greatful.

RandyC

cant u tell ur bios to boot to drive d: instead? Otherwise i dunno

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1.2AMD Athlon Thunderbird
Gigabyte 71XE4 M/Board
512MB PC133 Hyundai RAM
NVIDIA 64MB GeForce 2MX200 AGP
Seagate 40GB 5,400Rpm HDD
Lite-On 16/10/40 BurnProof ReWriter
40x Compaq CDRom Drive
36x Creative CDRom Drive
Hauppage PrimioFM WinTV/Radio Card
Creative SoundBlaster 128PCI
NetGear 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Adapter
Blackwidow 648 USB Scanner
Epson 580 USB Printer

WindowsXP Professional Corporate Platinum Edition
WindowsXP Plus Pack!
OfficeXP Professional with FrontPage
Publisher XP
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I am doing that already ... just its a little long winded. I was hoping I could try and get W98 to appear in the Loader before I boot into XP.

The only reason I want to do this is because XP wont run a version of Prolog i'm using and there isnt an upgrade for it. I have tried all of the compatibilty modes but with no success ;(

Hmmm...I believe 98 has to be within the first 6GB of yer disk or in the primary partition. You could move the partition, but you'd need something like Partition Magic to do so.
That's where you're running into problems.

Thanks for the replys,

I would change it over to the primary partition if I had one. I'll explain again.

I have XP on my first hard disk and my old win98 install on a removable harddisk which I use to run between uni and home. XP doesnt pick up the 98 install when i run bootcfg in the recovery console and it doesnt like me placing the line d:\"Windows 98" to try and boot through the boot.ini . Currently i'm having to change the boot drive in the bios each time I want to use win98 to run a program that doesnt like XP (I have tried everything to get it to work under XP i.e. compatibility mode and it doesnt work, just GPF's on me, but in win98 it works fine). If anywone can tell me how to add an existing win98 install to the boot.ini file that I would be very greatful as it saves me booting changing the bios.

RandyC

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AMD Athlon T/Bird 900
Asus A7V133 Motherboard - 1007 FINAL bios
512mb Crucial CAS2 RAM
Hercules Prophet II MX 32meg Duel Disp.
2 x Iiyama Vision Master 17
1x IBM 60GXP 40.0gb (Windows XP Professinal inst. Partition 1, Linux-Mandrake 8.1 Partition 2 - Duel Boot)
1x FUJITSU 2gb Removable (Windows 98 SE installed)
HP 9110 CD-RW
Hauppage WINTV Nicam PCI
SB Live Value
NETGEAR FA311 Network Card
Terajet 210 Cable Modem connected via USB
Canon Canoscan N650u scanner
HP 610c Printer & HP Laserjet 5
======================================================

You *could* try this.

Switch your removable disc caddy and C drive around in your PC...

ie make the caddy Primary master and 'C' drive primary Slave.

In bios, make first boot device primary master, second boot device primary slave.

When-ever your removable drive is in place, it'll get assigned 'Drive C' and boot, but your XP drive will be assigned drive D. Data disc drive E, and so on.

When not in, you XP drive will be assigned Drive 'C' and boot.

CAUTION - anything you've got in your removable drive pointing to drive D will write to your XP drive (you don't want that to happen)

To get round this, you could tell your 98 OS to 'hide' the XP drive (drive D) from the control panel, and rename drive E to drive D.

Could give that a try


Andy ;-)

Dual booting of Windows XP with another Windows OS such as 98 or ME (NT, I don't know), you will need the ntdetect.com, ntldr, boot.ini (you should have them), another pagefile.sys on the Windows OS root directory (I don't know why there is another) etc, and most important, bootsect.dos, the boot sector image of another Windows OS. Without it, even you write the boot option of the Windows OS in boot.ini, Windows XP doesn't know how to do. Whenever Windows XP or Windows 2000 is installed with an existing Windows OS, it modifies the master boot record of the harddisk and add its own boot sector to it, then move the boot sector of the OS to bootsect.dos. When the computer boots, it reads the boot sector and calls up ntldr (NT loader). NT loader allows you to select OS which is written in boot.ini. If you select another OS, NT loader then call the bootsect.dos to boot another OS. I hope I am writing the right thing because I have tried to do the same thing but I search in the net and find out it is quite difficult.

Thanks for the replys. Just one question though how do I make a bootsect.dos file for the W98 drive?

RandyC

Yeah well I have tried that before and the recovery console bootcfg doesn’t detect my w98 install on the removable drive. I didn’t have my removable drive in when I installed XP originally but that doesn’t matter. I can’t make a bootsect.dos that way because I never overwrote the winxp boot sector as I have that on my 40gb drive. All I want to do is to be able to add the windows 98 install that’s on my removable drive to the bootloader. I have already tried to place it manually in my boot.ini file but with no luck. This is due to the removable drive not having a bootsect.dos file to boot from. Is there an application or a way of making a bootsect.dos file from a win98 install so I can add it to the bootloader.

Thanks

RandyC

AlecStaar,

I think I have found the tool that will do such a thing. Its called Bootpart and it can be found at: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

As for the removable disk i'm using, it's a standard FUJITSU harddisk attached to a removable hard disk mounting in a 5 1/4 drive bay. I use it at uni to transport my files from my network drive to home. Its a little bulky but it does the job

Hope this app helps

RandyC