Dual Boot to Single Boot

I have recently been having boot problems with drive 1, only 1.5 years old. The message I get is that the boot failed. Drive 1 has W98 and Drive 2 has W2k on dual boot. This problem required some rebooting the past week. I tried running scandisk thru 98 to correct drive 1, but it has recurred.

I think the problem might occur because the primary partition, being on the exterior of a drive, is the most prone to warpage. This somehow makes the boot files unreadable because of the track being warped. I just replaced a 6-year-old drive on my other system due to this.

Anyway, my first question is, if I someday I cannot get drive 1 to boot, can I just switch my bios to boot from D? Or will I need to do anything first?

2nd, I wonder if I should just back up separately my C drive boot files, and then restore them -- they would be rewritten somewhere else. Any ideas?

 

Interesting idea Tom and logical. But it won't work.

Regardless of where you have the 2K OS located, your system will first check information in the MBR (master boot record) that is located in the first sector (sector#0) on C:.

The system will check that location for instructions on locating the startup files and if it doesn't find the information, it doesn't boot.

If you are running FAT32 with 2K, you could also logically assume that you could FDISK /MBR and get things going. Not so again. First, FDISK /MBR only writes the first part of the boot record (the MBR part) and leaves the partition table alone. Also, I'm not aware of any way to force FDISK /MBR to look anywhere except at C:.

Maybe someone else knows a work-around but I surely do not.

On the repair front, have you tried a re-install of 98 over the existing?

And a Hd the age of your new one should certainly not be failing like yours seems to be. Since this is the 2nd to behave this way, there may be a hardware issue of some sort. I have no clue since I have learned over the years that I should leave hardware issues completely alone. I used to just make em worse most times.

 

Newt,

Then I suppose since I have ghosted drive 1 partitions onto drive 2 and vice versa as recommended at radified.com that I will be able to restore the system, should it not boot, by booting to ghost on my A drive and restoring C.

Tom

 

You may be looking at a Dual Boot gone haywire.

With a Dual Boot made up of 98 & 2K and switching from one to the other things go wrong it can result is the situation that you have.

Also if you ran any programs in 98 in the DOS Mode it can further complicates matters if something went wrong in the switch over between Windows to DOS & back.

Been there. Done that. And will never again.

It is too easy to use a Boot Manager and put each one on its own separate C: drive. And then have a Multi OS system with out the Dual Boot.

With Dual Booting if it does not go right, ? ( you know the rest. )

I like the idea that Newt posted. Try a re-install of 98.

Then I believe 2K has a Boot Repair function.

BillyBob