Reversing a Duel Boot between xp and 98

Hi.

A few months ago I implemented duel boot between 98SE and Xp home. I now no longer use 98se at all and need to reclaim the hard drive space for use with XP.

Drive C: 98se (also has partition drive E )
Drive D: XP Home (also has partition drive F)

G and H are cd drives
a floppy drive (no comment lol)

Is it safe to delete all of drive C, with exception of the following files?

ntdetect.com
ntldr

Is there a way to make C 98... C xp instead?

Thank you, hope all the info is correct for an answer.

 

Hello Basstracker,

The boot record, boot.ini, would still have 98 as a boot entry and its better to let the RC rebuild it.

You can do this in two ways, both use XP's Recovery Console.

XP's boot record is on Partition/Drive C. You can leave the HD's in their current physical locations and go thru the RC procedure below, or

Physically switch C with D, disconnect what is now the C drive, and go thru the RC procedure below. Switching them then entails the further procedure of changing shortcut/program drive letter accesses. The way the drives are jumpered also needs to change - what was D should now be Master. If the drives are jumpered as Cable Select, then no need to do anything.

Boot into XP using the XP disc:

To start the Recovery Console from the Windows CD, follow these steps:

Insert the Windows CD and shut the system down, then restart. Follow your computer’s prompts to start from the CD. (You may need to adjust settings in the computer’s BIOS to enable the option to start from a CD.)

Follow the setup prompts to load the basic Windows startup files. At the Welcome To Setup screen, press R to start the Recovery Console.

When prompted, type the Administrator password. If you’re using the Recovery Console on a system running Windows XP Home Edition, this password is blank by default, so just press Enter.

From the Recovery Console, type bootcfg /scan to list all available Windows installations on all available disks/partitions.

Use bootcfg /add to append a Windows installation to Boot.ini. Leave out 98.

After re establishing XP's boot record, then you can Format the 98 partition if you did it by switching the drives or delete all the files on that partition minus XP's boot files.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi basstracker!

One thing to keep in mind when reconfiguring XP, or any other OS for that matter, you must always have at least one Primary partition somewhere. In other words, you cannot boot a system installed on a logical drive of an extended partition if there is not another drive present with a Primary partition.

In your case, if XP is installed on a logical drive of an extended partition and you delete the Primary partition that Win98 is obviously installed on, XP will no longer be bootable. I doubt that you have XP installed on an extended partition but I just wanted to warn you in case you did.

If XP is installed to a Primary partition, then you can do as you proposed, delete all except the Boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com files. Those three are necessary for a normal boot of XP although it will boot without the boot.ini file under certain situations. You will need to edit the boot.ini file after you wipe the Win98 files and prior to rebooting. That's no big deal since all that is necessary is to edit out all lines referencing the Win98 system. If you err in editing it, you can still save the day by using a "Quick Boot" floppy or CD to boot with. You could also edit it using the XP Recovery Console but it's a bit of a kluge.

I much prefer the last method you suggested - moving the XP files to the C: drive to replace the Win98 files. There are many ways to do that:

1. Drive Imaging
2. Drive Cloning
3. Drive swapping

Drive imaging would involve using some drive imaging software such as Ghost or True Image to create an image of your XP partition and then restoring that image to the Win98 partition. That effectively wipes the Win98 files in the process. I'll not go into details now.

Drive cloning would involve using drive cloning software to clone the XP drive to the Win98 drive. This would be my preferred method. There are freeware that can do that job but you must be sure that they can create a "Bootable" clone. I use one called XXCLONE with great results.

Drive swapping would involve disconnecting and swapping the data cables of the two drives. Then boot to the XP drive and format the Win98 drive while in a Windows XP session. Merely right click it and select Format. An NTFS file system would be preferred if you have no reason otherwise. With this method you will have to verify that the XP system is installed on a Primary partition and that the three files mentioned earlier are present in the root. You can verify all that before taking any other steps so that things will go as planned. The worst thing that could happen if those files were not there would be that you would need to have a "quick boot" boot floppy or CD to boot with. Then when you boot XP with one of those bootable disks, copy the three files from it to the root of your C: drive.

Investigate your XP installation and decide how you want to proceed and I'll give more details and sources for the tools mentioned.

I just noticed charlesvar has posted on this also so now you have many choices. Good luck.