Win XP/Win 98 Dual Boot System

I've got a few games that won't run correctly on XP that ran fine on 98 and I was wondering if someone could talk me through creating a dual os system.

I know I'd have to create a FAT32 partition (can this be done with the other partition being NTFS?) but then I'm not so sure from there on.

I've researched it on the net a little but every method I've found requires a Win XP install which I don't have.

Also, can someone reccomend me a prefrably free program to create the partition?

Thanks.

 

Hello The-Hitman,

Considerations:

Yes, you need a new FA32 partition.

The partition on C (currently XP) must be FAT32 as well because the boot.ini file must be readable by 98. Can be converted by a cmd prompt or may be managed by a third party boot loader such as System Commander, costs $$.

What I would do is add a second HD, with the idea in mind of installing 98 on the new HD. fdisk will create the FAT32 partition.

In addition, once 98 is installed, the XP boot.ini will have to be repaired - letting it know that 98 is installed, not a big deal.

Its unfortunate that you don't have the XP install disc. Sooner or later you're going to have to need it because of some problem - for repair or hardware problem.

Regards - Charles

 

You didn't say if the computer were new or used. If new, it should have an installation CD of some sort...maybe called Recovery or Quick Restore or Restore or something of that sort.

If purchased new with Windows preinstalled, the vendor is required by the license to distribute Microsoft products to include an operating system install disk of some kind.

So if you don't have any kind of disk to recover or restore the operating system, contact the vendor who sold you the computer and demand one.

If you do have a recovery or restore CD, it will satisfy the requirments when the message "Please insert Windows CD" appears or, conversely, you can direct it to the I386 folder on the harddrive where the contents of the XP installation CD are stored.

 

First thing I tried.

It's worked with other games I've had problems with but there's 2 it hasn't worked for.

 

It comes with a Master CD creator (which I've yet to create yet so I'm not sure if it'll copy a seperate Windows install CD) but on my old PC (which is an older model by the same manufacturer) the master CD formatted the hard drive. This was just one CD though - this one is 4.

Still, It's nice to have a Win install disk seperate. It's come in handy many times on my old system.

 

Hitman - if you can figure out exactly what environmental values the games require, you can set up a specialized run area for them that includes those values. The games should then work fine - probably. You can usually do this by setting up config.sys & autoexec.bat files that only run with that particular app and only affect the section of memory it runs in.

The only ones that will not are games where the programmer made direct hardware calls to make a system do things it wasn't designed to do. Very common with older DOS games where there were limitations to what the OS could do. NT systems (including 2K/XP) do not allow an app to make hardware calls. Any that are attempted are trapped by an OS piece and if found to be safe/legal, the OS piece makes the calls.

 

Try abandon loader
www.angelfire.com/realm/zeroone/abandon.htm

 

We ran into the same problem as you. Here's the deal. If you want to set up a dual-boot system you should save important data onto CDs or whatever, then re-format the hard drive.

To install a dual-boot system, you should install Win98 FIRST, then install XP. Yup, a real pain! But doing it that way will definitely, definitely work the best.

On the other hand, why not just run those old games on the old computer???????

Regards

 

I have not found anything yet that will not run in XP other than ONE ( 1 ) ancient DOS game which requires files is the Config.sys and/or the Autoexec.bat. I did not like it anyway so I just dumped that one.

Some of them I just set them to run in the Win98 Compatablility mode.

I have a couple that are set to run in the Win95 compatability mode.

BillyBob