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Dual Boot Question

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
Is it possible to create independent dual boot drives by using the bios? I don't need the drives to interact with each other, but I want to put XP on my large drive and use it as my main operating system with the NTFS file system, and put Windows 98 on my second harddrive for use with my scanner.

Sooo... if I change the boot drive in the bios whenever I install/want to use windows 98, can I have two OS's totally independent of each other.
 

icepir8

Moderator
Why not use WinXP's dual boot option?
Installing Win98 first then install winxp on another drive/partition. The drive/partition can be ntfs. Win98 won't see the ntfs but winxp will see both. That is how I have my system configured.
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
Because Windows 98 can't be installed on NTFS. Besides, if Windows 98 or XP gets screwed up and I have to reinstall (which is quite often the case when I get to fooling around) then I won't have to re-install both of them.
 

icepir8

Moderator
hmm....

I must have missed what you are trying to do.

the only way that I know of using the BIOS to select your boot drive requires you have 1 IDE drive and 1 SCSI drive.
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
No, mine can select which IDE drive I want to boot from as well as which floppy, CD, and Network Device, I can also change the order in which it seeks for these devices so if I want it to look for a bootable CD before a bootable HD then I move the CD device first and select which CD drive to boot from.

The thing is, I'm not going to use Windows 98 much so I doubt I'l need to switch often.
 

Martin

Active member
Administrator
Here's how I'd do it:

1. If not already installed, install Windows XP first on one (NTFS) partition.
2. Create another (FAT32) partition on the other harddrive and install Windows 98.
3. If not automatically added to the primary harddrive's boot.ini, add one with bootcfg.exe. There you'll have your boot menu.
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
Yeah, thats what I did. Only I can't access the XP drive from windows 98, but thats ok.
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
OK, I've got it all set up now, but I need to know what the numbers on the boot config would be. Obviously the disk and partition would both be 1 since its my second hard drive and only partition. But what does rdisk and multi do and should there be anything after the name. I noticed the XP entry had "/fastdetect"

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition"

EDIT: For some reason this isn't showing on one line, but it should be.
 

Tk64

The Other Village Idiot
Eagle said:
OK, I've got it all set up now, but I need to know what the numbers on the boot config would be. Obviously the disk and partition would both be 1 since its my second hard drive and only partition. But what does rdisk and multi do and should there be anything after the name. I noticed the XP entry had "/fastdetect"

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition"

EDIT: For some reason this isn't showing on one line, but it should be.

/fastdetect happens on my Win2k thing here, too... sounds like a quick H/W detect mode that's on by default.

No idea what multi and rdisk do, don't ask, it works -right? :)
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
I don't know, I haven't tried it. I'm trying to set up the option in the dual boot settings.
 

HostLink

New member
The key is in the boot.ini file. Simply edit it and make sure to have "timeout=1" where 1 is the time in seconds that the OS list will be siplayed when booting. Then if u wanna reinstall win98, u can do it freely and even format the HD as long as u copy back the boot.ini and bootcfg.exe files to your root directory in C:\.

My boot.ini file is as follows:
[Boot Loader]
timeout=1
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"

Where C:\ says that win98 is installed on C:\ (recommended) adn winXP is on partition D:\ , magically located by windows XP boot system.
 
OP
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
Thats good, but mine is different, I actually have two hard drives, not just two partitions, so I should have two of those lines under [Operating Systems] not just one.
 

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