Multi OS Boot / Drive Letter Question

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

I've been reading through some of the past threads about dual boot setups and I've got a question. It seems like ME or 98 needs to be installed on the primary partion and 2k, XP need to be on the extended partition. However if you want to get rid of 98 or ME later, you're stuck with an empty drive on the primary partition and your OS on the extended partition.

So, my question is if I want to make a Tri-boot system with XP, 2K and ME on one physical HD, will the following work:

Step 1) Create a primary partition for XP (C: drive)
Step 2) Create an extended partition with 2 logical drives (D: for 2K and E: for ME).
Step 3) Format C: and D: as NTFS and E: as Fat32.
Step 4) Install 2K first on the D: drive.
Step 5) Install WinME on the E: drive using the setup /ntldr command.
Step 6) Finally, install XP on the C: drive letting XP control the boot process.

The way this would work (in my mind anyway 😉) is when I boot to either XP or 2K, XP will be C:, 2K will be D: and ME will be E:, but when I boot to ME, it will be C: because it can't see the NTFS partitions. Then, when I want to get rid of 2K and/or ME later, I can just modify the boot.ini, format the partition and merge it into the C: XP partition. This way I won't have to reformat and repartition to get my OS back on the C drive.

Is my thinking right on this or am I way off? 😕

 

[Nothinman]

I think you're overall logic is right, but XP and 2K are very close to the same, no real reason to have both unless you have drivers for one that don't work in the other, in that case choose the one that supports your hardware. Win98 is just a POS and should never be installed voluntarily.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

Well, I'd like all three (Me for games w/o XP compatability, 2K to emulate my system at work and XP for home/everything else). I can see dumping ME and 2K within 6 months or so and I would really rather not have to fdisk to get XP back on C:

Unfortunately, I tried my theory and it didn't work. 🙁 ME wouldn't install because the boot partition wasn't FAT32. Anybody else ever get something like this to work or have any ideas? Thanks.

 

[DaveSimmons]

System Commander or Partition Magic let you create multiple C: partitions (up to 3) and PM comes with Boot Magic to un-hide the appropriate partition each time you reboot. If you put the OS you plan to keep (XP?) as the first C: partition and put the others after it, you can eventually delete the other two and resize the XP partition to fill the space (at least using Partition Magic, don't know about System Commander)