Dual boot between Win2K & 98 doesn't work anymore

[Simon Ngan 0]

Hi,

 

I installed Win2K Pro about a week ago on top of Win98. I made another partition for Win2K and everything was working fine until an hour ago. I tried to boot to Win98 from the BOOTMENU, however, after I press ENTER from the menu, I got "SYSTEM FILES NOT FOUND, REPLACE THE DISK AND CONTINUE". I can still boot to Win2K no problem, but I want Win98 back.

 

Any ideas how to bring 98 back? Thanks a lot

 

Simon

[Deider 0]

We're you using Partition Magic to resize the partitions? I did that and had the same results as you are having. When I would select Windows 98 from the boot menu, I would get "invalid system disk" with no floppy in the drive.

[Simon Ngan 0]

Yes, I used PartitionMagic to create the partition. I originally had only one partition with Win98. Then I used PartitionMagic to make 2 additional partition - FAT32 for Win2K and FAT32 for a common drive used between the 2 Operating Systems.

 

When I installed Win2K, I selected to use the empty partition that PM created. Then I format it to NTFS (I couldn't do it with PM). Everything was working just nicely but today I'm getting the errors.

 

Thanks

 

Simon

[Simon Ngan 0]

I found the solution from MS Support Site. Well, I wasn't aware DEFRAG from Win98 would damage the Win2k Boot Sector. That's what exactly happened to me, I ran DEFRAG from WIN98 and defrag WIN98 partition.

 

Anyway, the fix to my problem is to use a DOS/WINDOWS bootable floppy and SYS C: at the prompt. This will enable back the Win98 portion. But using SYS C: will destroy Win2k partition, so you need to pop in the Win2k CD and select "R" to repair ONLY "NT Boot Sector". You need not to repair anything else. After it's done, you should be able to boot to either Win98 or Win2k partition without any difficulties.

 

Simon