Can I dual boot Win NT 4 and Win 2K with Win 2K already installed?

[TheBorg]

I have Win 2K installed on my primary HD and need to install Win NT 4.0 also.
I would like to install NT on my secondary HD.

If anyone can explain me how to go about this without formatting my HD and starting with the installation of NT, I would be eternally grateful!

 

[jeebus21]

I could rant about this but here is a place to go to:
Win2k Boot Issues Just sign up with an email address, etc. because it is worth the read.

The main points are this:
1) You should have a small boot partition formatted to FAT16 since NT cannot read FAT32 on install.
2) NT should always be installed first because you get a STOP error due to NTFS differences if you have NTFS for Win2k.
3) You cannot run NT Repair after NTFS 5.0 is used because NT Repair cannot see an NTFS 5.0 partition.
4) People seem to swear by Partition Magic for things like this.

 

[Zach]

You could unhook the Win2K drive, hook up another drive, install NT onto it, upgrade to the newest Service pack (so it can read Win2K's NTFS), and then hook the Win2K drive back up...

You'd have to make some precautions first, to assure you'll be able to get back into Win2K. Some registry editing..

 

[jeebus21]

If he does not have a FAT16 boot partition, then this will work not until a service pack (4). Most undoubtedly, his Win2k drive is FAT32 or NTFS 5.0, and NT cannot read from either of these for boot.

What about drive letters? Win2k will not allow itself to be pushed from C: to D: because it is the boot device. NT will believe that it, too, is the boot device, as the other drive was not plugged in. What happens, should you get to boot into NT, and it believes that it is the boot drive when Win2k wants to demote it to the D: drive?

He should get a STOP command with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE when he adds multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1) to his boot.ini because the file system difference stops it.

You should have seen the post I wrote before. It was just like yours with details on boot.ini and everything...but I figured I would just put a link.

The easiest thing to do would be to get Partition Magic 6.0, resize his Win2k drive by 2MB, make a FAT16 partition at the beginning of the drive, boot with the 2000CD, choose to repair the installation (it will fix the boot sector), and then try to get his NT working. Since he didn't go NT --> 2000, he will have a harder time.

good luck

 

[hovenas]

www.pcformat.co.uk

snoop around in their downloads section and get syscommander lite, a freeware (actually a downsized syscommander) that allows 4 os independant from one anoter...