Dual Boot Question (Not another one of those!)

Thanks for reading this! Maybe you can help.

I had Win 2000 installed on my computer for a while now. I recently installed Win 98 on my D drive. Of course Win 2000 is strictly on my C drive.

2000 and 98 are both on FAT partitions.

After installing 98, I only boot to win 98. I am aware that if I had 98 installed first and then installed 2000 I could have automatically created a boot menu which would allow for a choice during system start up. Since I already had 2000 and wanted to also have 98, I didn't want to go through the pain and time of installing 2 O.S.'s from scratch, all the programs, and updates too.

My question is: Anyone know the best way to create a working boot menu for my situation?

(Do I have to make a boot disk from 2000 and do whatever next? Please be descriptive.)

THANKS!
Mike

 

It sounds like the installation of Win98 has set your D: drive as the active partition.

You need to:

1) boot into DOS, (Press F8 at boot up time and select Command prompt)

2) Run FDISK and select "Change Active Partition" and set it to your C: drive.

3)Exit DOS and boot as normal. That should take you into Windows 2000

Once in 2000 you should add a line to the boot.ini file to point to the win98 installation on D: drive

if D is on the same physical drive as C then use:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS= "Windows 98"

if D is on a separate disk, use:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Windows 98 "

This enable you to select either operating system at bootup.

Hope this works, someone might want to check the syntax of the boot.ini lines, I did it from memory and my memory is full of alcoholic haze.

 

Thanks, Grunty. I will try that.

 

Still a no go..

Grunty,

I booted to DOS and used FDISK to find out that the one and only partition that can be set active is active...

I guess my Win98 install fudged my pc's ability to boot into Win 2000 at all.

I'll try creating Win2000 boot disks and doing a repair install then manually configuring the boot options, unless anyone has a better idea.

 

Use the Recovery Console and try the Fixboot command. Maybe Fixmbr will be needed as well.

 

dual boot...

IMHO... you are travelling a bumpy road. General rule for dual booting Windows is always install the older OS first. When you installed '98' after '2k' it changed some parameters in the boot files and it won't allow '2k' to boot properly. I would start from scratch... install 98 then 2k. It's some extra work but you will be happier in the long run.

B

 

Newt and Mr. B,

Thanks to both of you for your posts. I no longer have an issue because I have purchased a new pc.

I didn't give up on the old one, it just the old one is very old (AMD K62 350mhz)

It worked fine for my needs but multimedia/games were not worth while (as you can guess why). I still use it but I am no longer concerned with dual booting, I will reinstall everything after I move all my files.

New PC is a AMD 2400+ Emachine Computer, while I always used to think Emachines were garbage this one has promise since it's upgradeable and comes stocked nicely for the price.

I am now a Windows XP user. I must admit that I.C.S. was a total breeze to setup on my old Win 2000 system, and required a little more work on XP but I got it going strong now. (I now have 3 pc's)

Thanks again!