Win2k startup disks and dual boots.

I am currently trying to dual boot win98 onto win2kpro. I realize that it is much better to have a prior installation of 98, however that is not a possibility. I know how to do the dual boot, however, for some reason I cannot get a working set of win2k boot disks. I load up my 2k cd and run the boot32.exe, and/or boot.exe and create seemingly fine disks. When I restart the machine with them, it halts and gives me error 7 'could not load ntkrnlmp.exe. I thought that perhaps I had corrupt disks, so I went to another machine and made boot disks and it yielded the same results. I then used the boot disks on another machine which yielded the same results. The only commonality between the two PC's i did this on is that the primary partition is NTFS. Could it be that making boot disks from the CD on an NTFS partition renders boot disks inoperable? I'm prepared to revert back to FAT32 via PM7, but I'd like to know more info on this. Once I get boot disks that actually boot, I can load up a repair disk and reinit my boot.ini file so that 98 doesnt take over. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Just a thought, have you tried installing BootMagic from your PartitionMagic disks? Then when you have 98 installed, you can copy/move the 2k boot files and tweak your boot.ini file.

 

actually i know thats an option, However I would much rather use the win2k boot manager after POST than have a 3rd party loader. If worst comes to worst, I will use it though.

 

Is your PC unable to boot from CD-ROM?

It seems as if that would be the better solution if you have that possibility.

If you don't know if that is possible I would recommend that you try to go into the BIOS of the machine and see if the "Boot order" command allows you to have your CD-ROM as your first boot device.

Then you should be able to just boot and run the installation off your Windows 2k CD-ROM, thereby bypassing the hassle of boot disks entirely.

I'm not 100% sure about this. But if the aforementioned method doesn't work for you, you might be able to fix it anyway with a Windows 98 bootdisk.
Try to boot up with the Win98 bootdisk, and choose the option to boot with CD-ROM support. Once it's finished booting, change to your CD-ROM drive and cd into the i386 directory and run the Winnt.exe command, I believe that should also start the installation routine. Windows NT/2000/XP doesn't have an Install.exe or Setup.exe like the Win 9x series has.

(as I said I'm not 100% that this will work, however I'm pretty confident that you can't "break" anything by attempting this method - so it might be worth a try)

 

I did consider using the CD to boot from as an option. Only thing is, I'm not sure how its supposed to work. I set the CD as the first boot device, loaded the disk and it booted like normal. Maybe thats what its supposed to do. I thought it should boot into the setup only when doing it from the 2000 disk. Maybe that is only if the OS isnt previously installed. Please advise. Also note that I have no way of knowing if it attempted to load via CD, couldnt, then went on to the other boot devices such as the HD and loaded from there.