PC will not boot past Boot Magic loading (Dual Boot XP/98SE)

I am truely lost as to what is installed where. System Commander has a boot manager that will work with NTFS. But Windows 98 has to be installed within so many sectors of the front.

 

PeteC, It looks like RayH may have come up with something. In my last post I had an inkling that somewhere I read the same thing as he mentioned:

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I found this on MS KBA Support site:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q217210

I don't know if it means anything or not, but

 

That hal.dll error happened to me once when I was using the Microsoft NTBoot loader to run things. It was trying to boot XP from the FAT32 partition that had 98 on it. No, there wouldn't be a hal.dll file on there since that was located on my D: partition with the rest of the XP stuff. I was able to fix it by editing boot.ini to start from the XP partition.

I guess that with dual-booting, sometimes perfectly operating boot-loaders and operating systems will lose track of where things are located. Perhaps a file gets corrupted and the program just looks to where it is supposed to look on a standard setup, doesn't find what it needs, and fails.

It's a good thing we still have humans to perform stuff like heart surgury, ehh? Imagine a robot who didn't find exactly what was looked for because the newer version of his program file that contained the updated information had become corrupted and he "fixed" things by replacing the corrupted file with the older working version. Yikes!

 

I don't understand two C:\s on the same hard drive. I understand FAT32 not seeing NTFS. But NTFS can see FAT32.

Normally, such a configuration would be C:\ Windows 98 and D:\Windows XP. There usually isn't any problem. There's even no need for Boot Magic.

 

Thoughts: experience vs. discussion.

If you can get to that point again, I'm sure you'll copy that data to the temp. drive. Hope you made the file systems FAT32 so you can access the data with DOS if necessary.

Myself, I made a small 8±GB partition for win98 and a small 10±GB p. for XP, both FAT32 on separate HDDs (C: and D: ), and a 16 GB NTFS for files larger than 4GB for the dvd writer, and the rest FAT32 for data. I'm familiar with too many situations like this that would be easily solved if DOS could see the data. Of course, if you need to password protect your data, then NTFS is ALMOST your only choice, but it seems to me that there's too much (DANGER OF?) lost data owing to the use of NTFS.

I don't see the point of NTFS on an individual's computer. Yes, I hear the argument that NTFS is more efficient; but what's the big deal with 80+GB HDDs? It's like saying that assembler is more efficient for programs (TRUE) so all programs should be translated into assembler (not true because the speed of current CPUs makes that unneccessary).

 

Well done!

 

RayH,

It's really user preference. What you're saying is absolutely correct (as I'm sure you're aware). However, the option exists to hide the partitions from each other. I like this. When I'm working within an OS, that's the whole computer as far as the OS and I are concerned. No drives to scroll down to in Explorer. Once, XP actually set itself up as the F: Drive, after the 98 C and my cdrw D and my DVD-ROM E! I never figured that one out. It was a pain scrolling down to the F Drive to access stuff.

Examples of conflicts that broke programs include McAfee updates that insisted on installing to C even though the program was on the D Drive. Obviously those updates wouldn't work properly and wrecked QuickClean and VirusScan. Yeah, awhile back and old versions but that's something that can happen when both OS's are accessible to each other.

I just like this better. Bugs and mistakes can happen that will play havoc with computers no matter which way is used. I always tell myself this is the last time in a long time I'll be reinstalling. Then something happens that will make me want a fresh start to a system.

Something I don't like about the "separate" way with PM and BM: I can't use the GoBack program. It's only compatible with the official Microsoft NT Boot Manager with a single 9x and a single XP partition, or a single OS on the computer. That program is like magic. I'm only dual-booting again because my Radeon 7500 melted (the fan conked out and that resulted in the chip saying bye bye, a month after the 3 year warranty was up)! My Voodoo 5 5500 won't play my old MS-DOS games on XP. It needs FAT 32 for that. It's actually because the Voodoo has the better, newer VESA 3.0 while the Radeon only had the not as good but works on NTFS Vesa 2.0. So much for progress. And I don't see the point of running XP on FAT 32. So, I dual-boot.