Installed new HD - Win98se no longer loads

[mikee]

Ok, I have a 45 gig drive and a 20 gig drive. The 45 gig drive I split into 4 partitions before installing Win2k and Win98:

C - boot info, shared swap
D - Windows 98se
E - Windows 2000
F - Shared data space

Installed Win98se and then Win2k. Everything worked fine. Then I connected my second hard drive (which was disconnected during the whole installation sequence) as the slave on the primary ide channel. Win2k loads fine, but Win98se complains that it can't find the necessary files to start itself up.

I found out that during the Win98se boot sequence, my 20 gig drive (1 partition) gets assigned D. Of course it can't find the necessary files cuz they aren't installed there. How can I get the 20 gig hard drive to get assigned a different letter apart from D or E?

 

[Floyd]

Physical drives get assigned letters first, so the only way around it is to format your 20G drive as one big extended partition. Instead, a more elegant solution is to do the following:

Boot into Win2k, open msdos.sys (on your C: drive) in notepad and make the changes indicated.

[Paths]
WinDir=D:\WINDOWS <-- change the D to E
WinBootDir=D:\WINDOWS <-- change the D to E
HostWinBootDrv=C <-- leave as is, boot partition

Save the changes, then reboot and try entering Win98 from Win2k's boot loader menu.

Or you can do it from DOS by first changing the file's attributes and editing it the good old fashioned way:

attrib msdos.sys -h -r -s
edit msdos.sys
attrib msdos.sys +h +r +s

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[mikee]

Thanks Floyd. Started reading into how dos assigns drive letters last night. Figured I'd have to do something like you explained. Just didn't know how.

Mike