Partitions and Booting

Hi,

I am looking for an answer to this problem:

I have two physical hard disks on my system both are fat32 types. The first one is a 3G in size and is set as slave on the "first" IDE channel (connector 1 on m/board) and is used to store data(no operating system). On the same channel is my CD-RW set as master.

On the second IDE, I have a single 40G hard disk set as master, with Windows 98se and XP installed. When I installed the XP (clean install), it did not give me a choice to dual boot with the Win98se. When the xp finished install and the PC was rebooted, it went straight into 98se - no sign of XP!

Using my faithful XOSL boot manager, I managed to boot into XP, but found that it had stored the Boot.ini and ntldr and NTDETECT.COM files in the 3G storage hard disk. Now I am thinking of upgrading the 3G disk to a larger one. I suspect this will cause problems with XP start up due to its boot files disappearing.

Any ideas?

 

I would suggest placing the boot drive on the Primary IDE channel (by itself) since that is likely the reason XP is acting up.

 

Thank Zephyr

I have reconnected the IDE channels. After a lot of fiddling about, I got my system as I wanted it. This is because all the disk drive letters changed, and the registry was pointing at wrong drives

However a third party registry search and replace program
from my win98 installation sorted most of this and allowed XP to boot up again. I use XOSL to dual boot - wonderful little application