Installing Win 2000 to dual boot w/ Win 98? Pointers?

Factual Questions
1

I have win 98se and wanted to also install Win 2000 (dual boot). I have one 40 gig hard drive that I had already partitioned into a primary drive © and a logical drive (D) (both FAT 32). C has about 20 gigs and the rest is at D. All my Win 98 files and data are on the C drive and D is empty. I have Partition Magic Pro, so the process should be fairly simple, however there is one part of the instructions that confuses me. It says:

“In most cases Windows 2000/XP and Windows 95/98/Me boot partitions must all start below the 8 GB boundary to be bootable.”

So, does this mean that I must reduce the size of my C drive to below 8 Gigs (perhaps 7 gigs or so?)? All my files and data on the C drive take about 12 gigs or so, so what should I do with all that stuff? Create a third partition? What would be the most efficient way to organize this? Could I create a partition in front of my C drive? I’m confused . . .

2

That makes no sense - you can install an OS on ANY size partition, provided that its large enough.

3

From http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id3539.cfm :

To test if your BIOS supports INT13 extensions, download Tint13e.exe from:

http://www.esupport.com/techsupport/mrbios/mrbutils.htm

If you’re installing to a logical partition (instead of a primary partition), it doesn’t matter, because the Win2000 boot files will be located on the primary partition of the first physical hard disk (the current Win98se OS, which is within the 8GB limit).

4

Ahh . . I did not know that. I assumed the win 2000 boot files would also be on the logical partition. I also ran the utility and my BIOS does support INT13 extensions (have no clue what they are, though).

Thanks to both of you!!!

5

Here’s a short explanation of INT13 (INT is for Interrupt, 13 is the interrupt number) and its implications on boot partition boundaries:

http://www.2cpu.com/How-To/4gbplusNTpartition.html

Another point I didn’t mention earlier: Bootstrapping is the name for the method wherein only the boot code is installed to the existing primary partition, while the majority of the OS code can be located on the logical partition or on a primary partition of another hard disk. By using bootstrapping we ensure that the Windows 2000 boot files are contained on a primary partition that resides within the first 2GB of the primary hard disk.

6

Also System Restore usually uses about 12% of your HD, so figure in that 5 or 6 gigs it wants. I could set it for smaller on Me, I don’t know about XP or N2000