Help-- Dual Booting with XP/98SE

[McFly007]

So I have XP already installed on one of my hard drives (FAT32) and I have another hard drive (FAT32) that I wanna install 98SE on and be able to dual boot. Can I just go ahead and install 98SE on that hard drive and then find some software to allow me to choose which OS I wanna boot into or what? Also, if I have one program installed in say XP and I wanna use it in 98 (it is compatible with both) can I go ahead and do that?

 

[Longwheelbase]

Here's what I did. I had 98SE installed on my 40GB master and had installed a 60GB slave for data backup primarily.
1) I moved the files off the slave into a folder on the primary.
2) I rejumpered the hard drives to reverse the slave and master
3) I installed XP on the "new" master or C: drive

Now I can boot into whichever system I want simply by going into BIOS during bootup and changing the boot sequence from HDD0 to HDD1 or vice-versa. Simple and elegant - no software "patches," boot sector screw ups or anything of the sort to worry with.
This has allowed me to get XP up and running and make sure everything I want to do in it (games, etc.) works before I ditch the 98 files. One caution, since you indicate you may want to access some of the files on the XP drive from within WIN98, be sure to leave XP on a FAT partition and not NTFS. There are programs that supposedly allow 98 to access NTFS, but why chance it - XP will allow you to convert the FAT to NTFS at a later date but if you do, you may loose access to files from within 98.
Hope this is helpful.

 

[rmrf]

You could make a complete system backup of your xp machine, take the xp drive out of the computer, install 98se, put the xp disk back in the machine as master and set the 98se disk to slave. when xp boots, drop the backup that you made onto the 98 disk, set the 98 disk to master and the xp disk as slave, boot to the xp install disk, install xp. after xp is installed, restore from the backup that you dropped onto the 98 disk and you should be good to go. or just use the bios method.

 

[digitalman]

you do not nee to install any seperate app to switch OSes. the catch would be to install 98se first then xp. 98se is fairly an@l about being on the c:\ drive (primary controller; master disk, first primary partition) while xp can be run from any controller, disk and partition without a problem. when you install XP it will also install a boot loader that will allow you to pick which os you want to boot into.

I wrote this next part for a different thred but it probably applies to you too:

you may want to have a seperate partition for your data though. by doing that you can use one partition independant of the os to store your stuff. it *could* hose up your machine to read/write to the other os's partition. another trick you can do is you can install all your apps onto the third partition. install it in one os and then reboot to the other os and install to the same place. that should help save some disk space and prevent you from having to install apps like office into 2 different folders.

the real benifit of the third partition is if one of your OSes takes a huge drive it is far easier to retrieve your data as you are not looking all over each one of the 2 partitions for things that you saved. Good luck!