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Dual Booting

Discussion in 'Legacy Windows' started by Nick Mikhay, 2018/05/26.

  1. 2018/05/26
    Nick Mikhay

    Nick Mikhay New Member Thread Starter

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    I would like to ask if anyone knows how this is done. I was attempting to setup a dual booting system with win98se and another operating system, in this case it was Windows 2000 Professional.
    I installed each OS on its separate drive. I am not sure how I did this, and whether I installed from within the first installation, but I got the startup menu, and when I booted into each OS, it had drive C: as its drive.
    I thought this was really convenient, and it has a nice feel. I have also attempted to repeat, but then the drives changed. (did you catch that?) for example 98 was C: and 2000 was D:

    Again, no joke, when I booted from the start menu each OS installation would show itself and all of its files and folders on drive C: and the other drive as D: And they were both mounted on separate physical drives. Again, I had some trouble replicating this, so I thought to ask if anyone knows exactly how to do it.
     
    Nick Mikhay,
    #1
  2. 2018/05/28
    TonyT

    TonyT SuperGeek Staff

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    Windows operating systems will always show the booted system as drive C. If boot to 98 it will be on C. If boot to 2k it will be on C. That's normal because you cannot boot 2 operating systems at the same time. If you had a 3rd and 4th windows installation they too would show as being on drive C when booted.

    There are 2 types of "drive order". The one set by the operating system and the actual motherboard port order recognized by the bios. The bios will always show the order of drives based on the motherboard ports, e.g. sata 0, sata 1, sata 2, etc.
     
    TonyT,
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  4. 2018/05/29
    Nick Mikhay

    Nick Mikhay New Member Thread Starter

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    Yes that makes sense, but I was asking how this is done, althought now I don’t want to do it again because it took all day to install xp.

    When it did it wrote a few files into c: drive and installed itself into e: drive. Its not much different but I preffer if the letters changed around. Is there a step you need to take to make both drives c: at boot?
     
    Nick Mikhay,
    #3
  5. 2018/06/01
    TonyT

    TonyT SuperGeek Staff

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    Drive letter assignment is controlled by the operating system. Disk Management will always show which drives are which (0,1,2,3 etc). The booted (active) windows operating system will always be drive C. This is always the case.

    To prevent one operating system from writing to another drive during install you must remove the other drive prior to installing. When both drives are connected you will not now have the windows boot menu to select which drive to boot. To choose which drive to boot you'd have to use the bios boot menu.
     
    TonyT,
    #4

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