First time dual boot XP/98SE - 2 HDDs

Because you can.

 

Very funny

 

That's how I understand it to be. It would have been my course of action but I didn't want to create the boot.ini for a dual boot system seeing as I didn't plan on keeping XP on the used drive. I use to have a NickLock hard drive switcher but installed it in a customer's computer. Now I can't even find them anymore. I may just make a homebuilt setup. I have plenty of wired jumpers and a few dpdt switches laying about.

 

rsinfo, A great deal of insight can be gained by doing unconventional things. Booting 98 and XP is such.

Booting with a floppy is another example. This thread demonstrates the value of such information.

All the best.

 

surferdude2, if you want insight, please let me know how to install SE over XP and not the other way round. Some of my clients have programs that run only on 95 & refuse to run on XP and it would be of great help for them.

 

install Windows 98 after I've installed XP

This can be done but, the c drive needs to be formatted to a FAT file system in order for it to work. I've tried this procedure and it does work but, if XP is installed to the c drive and it's formatted as NTFS, forget it. In this case I've read that if the c drive has XP on it and it's formatted to NTFS you can install 98 and then do a repair install of XP to straighten things out. However, I've never tried it so i can't say from first hand knowledge that it works. If I get time in the near future, maybe I'll dig an old puter out of the attic and give it a try. Would be interesting to know for sure.

 

Hi rsinfo,

I kept this question / answer from years ago - I think from the PCMAG forum:

Never tried it myself.

Regards - Charles

 

IF the primary partition is NTFS you will have to make a 2nd Primary partition (extended partition will not work).
1) Use fdisk and make the new partition active
2) install 9X OS
3) Decide if you want to use a third party boot manager or XP boot loader, Win2k likely same but unknowen to me
4) If useing XP's boot loader- run fdisk and make the first primary partiton active (the one with XP).
5) Boot into the Recovery Console and run Bootcfg /scan (I think that is the switch) and add the 9X OS.
Hopefully that will work with no more commands, may have to make Bootsec.dos.
(I have installed the RC onto the hdd and it also did the setup automaticly)