Currently, I have two partitions on the FAT32 harddrive. One of 3 gigs for WIndows98 and the other of 10Gigs for applications.
I will be getting WIndowsXP soon, and I want to set it up so that I can put XP on the 10Gig Applications drive and choose which OS to load at atartup, so that I can test it and see how well it works before overwriting my old Win98. I don’t want any of the XP on C: drive yet. Is this even possible? How might I do this?
Ok, well I figured out that I can simply install XP fresh on D: Drive (applications) and it will be self-contained there.
What I don’t know how to do, and what I need a bit of help on is how to make the menu that prompts you at bootup on what OS you wish to run.
Anyone?
If you can get to the point where you can install XP on the D: drive, it should be smart enough to figure out that there’s another OS and automatically set up the menu for you. At least, that’s what my dual boot machines did.
Ok, that’s good.
Thanks for the info!
All recent versions of NT (NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP) will give you the option of upgrading Windows 98 on your C drive or doing a new install to D. If you do the new install, then it automatically sets up the boot loader for both operating systems. You’ll get a little menu when it boots, which varies a bit between the different NT versions, but will allow you to choose between whatever NT version you’ve installed and windows 98.
The boot options are stored in C:\BOOT.INI. You can edit this file to change which operating system is loaded by default and the timeout value. You can make the same changes from within NT, but I can never remember exactly where the setup for it is, and I vaguely remember it being in a different place on each of the different versions.
If you ever have to re-install the operating systems on these machines, install 98 first.
If you fear the NTLoader as I do, there are other commercially availible products suchs as Boot Magic
and System Commander that will take care of all the dirty work associated with running multiple OS’s.
The last version of Boot Magic I saw even had a GUI interface to let you point and click around with the mouse instead of using arcane dos commands.
Another alternative could be one of the many flavors of LILO that come along with Linux. Mandrake Linux currently has a very nice bootloader for your Win/Dos/Linux configs.
You fear NT loader, but you recommend LILO?
Yikes.
I’ve used both on numerous occasions. NT loader has yet to cause me major grief, but LILO has left me with un-bootable machines on two occasions. I use LOADLIN now instead of LILO. Since it doesn’t muck with the boot sector it’s much safer for your drive. However, it also requires that you boot to DOS to use it (which you can’t do in NT, 2000, or XP). It’s really cute to have a Linux shortcut on your Windows 95 or 98 machine though (just make a shortcut to LOADLIN and check the box for run in dos mode).
I’m guessing that the OP’s technical skills are limited as such that things like boot managers should be avoided. NT loader installs itself as part of the normal NT install process, so it’s almost impossible to muck it up.
Yup…just like it’s said above, install XP to drive D, and it’ll take care of the rest. I have a dual boot XP/98 drive, (still running XP RC2 from July), but I haven’t booted into 98 since early August.
Jman