Dual boot formating Information....Tested!!

Kinesis

Senior member
May 5, 2001
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OK I tried something for the sake of learning myself the do's and don'ts. Now some of you know this already, that is great, but others don't. But I would accept any corrections from anyone.

I dual booted a system with Windows 98SE and W2k. Both on FAT32 filesystem. No problems. It should be noted that Win98 was on a 2GB drive and W2k was on a 1.28GB Drive. So physically seperate hard drives.

I then proceeded to convert the file system in W2k to NTFS and test the dual booting and Win98 operation afterwards. To convert was easy as pie. Open a Command prompt in W2k and then type the following : convert D: /fs:ntfs , hit enter and it will prompt you for the Volume of the D: drive (or whatever letter your drive happends to be). Then it will ask you to reboot and do so. Then reboot and w2k will convert it.

But here is the catch which I sadly discoverd today. Thank god for Partition Magic. I tried the same thing on my main system. Where W98 & W2k were on the same drive but different partitions. And bang! Lost W98 Bootability. W2k was fine. So it is true, you can do the FAT32/NTFS together, but on seperate physical hard drives. (Which I think is stupid).

Anyhow, hope this was informative...if not. Oh well.

 

lucidguy

Banned
Apr 24, 2001
396
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0
If you had used Smart Boot Manager, you could have booted an unbounded number of OS'es using an unbounded number of different filesystems, with no regard for the 4 Gb limitations of FAT16 or FAT32 filesystems, all from the comfort of a single hard disk.

I simply cannot pimp this utility enough. It is so keen and swell, it is scary sometimes.

Smart Boot Manager is GNU Free Software.
 

thebigbossman

Member
Apr 3, 2001
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if u look up NTFS on windows 2000 help it will give u the command to convert TO NTFS

and remember to keep the files as backup boot.ini ntldr ntdetect if u ever do a windows install again
 

Kinesis

Senior member
May 5, 2001
475
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Well Gee, Smart Boot Manager eh? Why didn't anyone mention it before? :D

Bigbossman, what would be the advantage of saving those files? I know it sound like a dumb question, but too me it seems to be like the registry backup that W98 does on everyboot. That way you can go back to a previous setup if problems occur. You know what, it never helps me. So I am just curious, cause maybe I am going about things all wrong?:confused:

Later
 

SUOrangeman

Diamond Member
Oct 12, 1999
8,361
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Read what mutli-booting *I've done* with the partitioning link below. Note that I now use bootpart from www.winimage.com for adding non-Windows OSes to the NT Loader.

-SUO