Dual Booting XP (Home) and 98

Hello Guys,
I took all the info off my friends windows 98 disc as I lost mine and I would like to dual boot it with my current OS, XP Home (SP1).
When I click on setup.exe it says that I cannot access the installation on my current windows version and need to do it in MS-DOS, but XP doesnt have MS-DOS does it?
Please Help Me! Ive tried everything!
Thanks
Luke

 

Unless you plan to Repair your XP installation be very careful. Dual boot is easy to set up if you start with 98. Going the other way is tricky.

Do some esearch first.

DRD

 

ok but HOW does having a FAT32 hard drive make a difference in having an NTFS one? (OS installation wise). I have a 40 gig hard drive, split into two partitions. 33 gig win XP and the new partition 7gig which i am hoping to install win 98 onto. the winXP partition is NTFS and the win98 one is FAT32
thanks,
luke

 

It's not that you can't have that setup, you just can't have it if you want to use the standard XP bootloader for dual booting, without doing some hot licks. The problem arises when Win9X insists on installing on the Primary active partition (normally C: ). XP has no such requirement. Since you already have XP installed to a NTFS file system on the C: drive, Win9X will not install and will let you know as soon as it tries to copy the files to your drive. It just can't see the NTFS file system and will act as if no drive exists to install upon.

With a 3rd party boot manager, you can hide your XP partition and make Win9x think it's installing on the primary active C:\drive or partition, which may actually be the D: drive or something else when the C: isn't hidden.

Otherwise, you have some serious juggling to do. It's possible and many have done it. For further info, just Google it.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sour...GLD:2005-15,GGLD:en&q=Install+Win+98+after+XP

 

Ok I have a Partition Manager (Paragon Partition Manager Pro) but my windows 98 data is on my C: and if I hide it, surely I cant install it(!?). And plus it wont let me install while xp is active (is being used) so what do I do? I have now converted my winXP disk to FAT32 if that helps.

 

Sounds like a catch 22 in your case.

You need not have changed the file system on XP since it really didn't help you. You'll have to get the win98 install files onto a medium that can be accessed in dos and one that doesn't need to be hidden for the install to take place. That means some partition other than the C: in your case. That would be either a CD or a HD partition formatted with the FAT file storage system normally.

This isn't work for the faint of heart and if you don't have some very good reason for installing Win98, I'd think seriously about abandoning this venture.

 

hmmmm a HD partition with FAT.... does that mean FAT in general (16, 32 etc) or a partition with just FAT
heres my hard drive specs
Local Disk(*, Type CE, 47MB TOTAL, None, Primary
WINXP (C, FAT32, 33GB TOTAL, Active, Primary
WIN98 (E, FAT32, 4GB TOTAL, None, Primary

i dunno if that helps coz u sed that I need a place to store the win98 files and i dont have a floppy drive or a CD-RW etc.
Please dont tell me im stuck i NEED 98.
You'd understand if you have 128MB RAM!
How slow XP is

 

Why not dump XP and install win98 exclusively?

If you don't want to do that, then copy the win98 folder to the e: drive. Use PM to hide the c: drive and install win98 to the e: drive. Since it's already formatted with FAT32, it should be all set to receive 98. I'm in no position to guarantee that you will succeed since I have never done this exact operation. It's unusual and more difficult since you have no install CD. Give it your best shot, PM is forgiving so you shouldn't be able to do permanent damage to the existing XP install without getting warned.

 

ok i did what you sed but C drive is still visible in 'My Computer' and i copied win98 into E drive but now ive come back to my original question; the setup wont run while windows xp is running. Is there any way to show you, screenshot wise? So the problem is I cant install while xp is active

Any Suggestions?

 

What about using a boot disk. You can create one in XP and use it to boot up and then start the install of 98.

DRD

 

You'll have to bone up on PM in order to have multiple active primary partitions to be selectable at boot up. That's the reason for the boot manager being needed under your circumstances. Read the help in PM as to PQBoot or whatever it's called. It takes care of hiding one active primary from the other.

Without that, it won't let you install in your current condition, not having hidden the C: drive yet.

 

You can also go to www.bootdisk.com and download a win98 bootdisk. Download the program and put a blank floppy into drive and run the program, DO Not just coppy the program to floppy.

Win98 will not see the XP partiton (NTFS) and while in 98 the drive will be C: not E:.

You will have to edit XP's boot.ini file to add 98 to the boot menu and maybe make a bootsec.dos file.
For help on bootsec.dos file go to http://www.mesich.com/ How to's- Installing 98 after XP at bootom of menu. then look for READ.scr debug commands. You should have no problem useing XP's boot loader.

 

just reread the posts , in post #4 you say XP is ntfs then later Fat32 , which is it. It does matter on how best to proceed and if my prior post is correct.

 

Win9x will only install to the primary hard drive. Since you have no FAT32 partition on your primary hard drive, you will need to manually create one.

A work around for that would be to disconnect the present primary HD and jumper one of your FAT32 drives to be the master. Then install to it. Then reconnect the XP drive with it set as a slave and run a repair install or else repair the bootloader by running the Recovery Console. This requires that you have the XP install cd.

It's a lot of work that way and there are several pitfalls along the way, but it can be done. It's just not possible to do it easily from remote control like this. That's why the PM method seemed better in this case. I think it should be as simple as running PM and selecting from the menu to "Install Another Operating System." PM will handle the details and keep you from harming things. As far as I know, it will insist on installing Win98 to the first primary drive. It will create a partition on that drive as needed.

I realize all of this may be confusing but I see no other way. You have now heard of two methods so take your choice if you decide to go forth. Personally I would dump XP and install 98 to the C: drive in standard fashion. As you have indicated, XP needs more hardware than you have so why belabor the point.