Resolved Configuring boot.ini for XP/98 dual boot

Just bought a 160 GB Seagate drive off eBay, works like a charm, I installed XP, completely sorted. All I need to do now is to configure the computer to offer a boot menu that works - both my attempts failed.

XP is on the 160 GB Seagate drive's primary partition, which BIOS recognizes as the master.
98 is on the 40 GB Western Digital drive, which BIOS recognizes as the slave.

Both are jumpered as cable select. Now, how do I configure it to give me a working boot menu?

As a side note, why does XP limit me to 32 GB when I want to create FAT32 partitions, and how can I merge them all together (there are 2 FAT32 and 1 NTFS that I wish to merge, not including the 40 GB NTFS boot section)? I'm not worried about data loss - there won't be any.

 

Reinstalling XP is not an option, I want the majority of the drive visible to Windows 98.

And do you know of any good, easy-to-use XP bootmanagers and partition mergers?

 

Thanks, I knew that bit, I was just wondering why they'd imposed such a limitation as FAT32 supports up to 127 GB or something like that, if I remember correctly.

 

Went and got Symantec BootMagic 8.05, it worked... until I discovered that the option it told me to tick in order to make sure that both OSes worked, has made all but the boot drives invisible to both OSes, and XP's disk management is no help. ARGH. And of course, BootMagic is on one of those invisible partitions... any idea of how to fix this without resetting all the partitions, or of a valid forum that would still help me with this program?

 

Thanks.

I've tried restoring XP, deleting the partition, neither worked. - really weirdly, it continued to try to use that boot menu, not the XP one... Tried creating a new partition to reinstall the program, that didn't fix the issue either. Tried deleting all partitions on the one drive, but can't do that for the WD as that has a lot of Win98 data on... Any ideas?

EDIT: Resolved the hidden partition issue using EASEUS Partition Master 6.5.2 Home Edition, and also now have just the two partitions on the Seagate: 40 GB NTFS for XP, the remaining 109 GB in a FAT32 partition.

Any ideas about the boot menu now? The Symantec thing is now gone

 

Unfortunately none of that post helps me. I've got no issues with the cable jumpering, and that multi-boot guide, typically of Microsoft, assumes everything is on one hard drive - and in any case it seems to hint that XP's install should've sorted everything, which it didn't. And up until I got rid of the bootloader, I was well aware of the F8 sequences, however I dislike those sequences, but had been using it - however, since Windows 98 has ceased to boot through that method, and the computer has attempted a boot via the motherboard's network controller. Disabling the network controller causes it to boot into Windows XP, even when not selecting the Seagate drive...

I wish to use a 3rd party bootloader, but I would like one that works properly!

I'd also like one for XP/Vista on this machine, but there we go.

 

I think you've got confused here between the two PCs. And Vista never created the boot menu anyway - this machine has Vista and XP on.

Yes, I have considered running Win 98 in a virtual machine. It doesn't have enough functionality for me in there (graphics issues mainly, as well as it either getting in my way visually or in terms of system resources), so I bought a Windows 98 PC. I recently bought a Seagate 160 GB hard drive, as mentioned, and installed XP on that - previously the computer had just had Windows 98 SE on a Western Digital 40 GB drive. I wish to set up a proper boot menu for both, and also now to actually make Win98 usable once more without reinstalling it.

 

RESOLVED: Acquired a copy of Acronis OS Selector 8.0, everything works fine. Even have used Paragon NTFS for Win 98 so I can see the NTFS partition in there.