Problems Dual booting XP and Win 98

[UncleRonnie]

I used Partition magic pro to partition and then I installed 98 FIRST on the secondary partition and then XP on the main partiton. XP works great, but 98 wont load. The welcome screen comes up then a dos prompt line with all these weird characters. Can anyone help me?

 

[bobcpg]

make sure that the 98 partition is not NTFS. I believe it needs to be fat32 or fat16.

-bob

 

[UncleRonnie]

i just checked it with Partition Magic....the 98 partition is FAT32. Thanks....Any other ideas?

 

[greenkabbage]

try using bootmagic. if the winXP partition is still active, it allow win98 to boot. bootmagic should hide the other OSs' partition, so that the active partition can boot without problems. try that.

-Jun

 

[wjsulliv]

Did you make your first partition NTFS when you installed XP?

If so that may be your problem... You might need a boot sector that is FAT32 so that you can load XP (on NTFS) and 98 (on FAT32)

 

[UncleRonnie]

yes i did convert the XP partiton to NTFS before installing it.
QUOTE------

If so that may be your problem... You might need a boot sector that is FAT32 so that you can load XP (on NTFS) and 98 (on FAT32)....
How would i go about that? and thank you for all of your help!

 

[UncleRonnie]

tried using bootmagic, but it said there were no FAT16 or FAT32 sections on Drive C: (where XP is installed)

 

[boomerang]

Windows 98 won't boot unless it is the C drive. XP doesn't care what drive letter it's on.

You are going to have to start over. Install 98 on C, and XP on whatever.

 

[greenkabbage]

using Pmagic, take away a bit from the beginning of the first partition and make it an FAT partition. then you can install bootmagic in that partition and you should be good to go.

|----------NTFS---------------| |-----------FAT32-----------------|
should become
|-FAT32-| |-----------NTFS------------| |-----------FAT32-----------------|


good luck

cheers
Jun

 

[UncleRonnie]

thx kabbage... i will try that out....

 

[redbeard1]

I dual boot a 98/xp box and a 98/win2k with no help from boot magic or anything else. My procedure is to partition the drive into two partitions, setting it up so the first partition is set to primary/active then install 98. After that is installed, then I install win2k/xp on the second, logical, partition. The win2k/xp install recognizes the existing 98 install and automatically sets up a dual boot.

On a side note, I used to have a drive partitioned in three parts, and setup to boot C: 6.22 dos, D: win 3.1, and E: win95. Again without boot managers. So unless something has changed, you could probably tell win98 to be on any partition you wanted.

 

[wjsulliv]

Win 98 can be on any partition... I've done the following
C: Win XP (FAT 32)
D: Linux
E: Win 98 (FAT 32)

without problems... Installing 98 first and then within 98 putting int he XP disk and saying you want to install to a different partition will cause XP to automatically set up a dual boot...

But as I said before you probubly need the boot loader to be on a fat 32 partition...

This I suggest this:
C: Boot loader (FAT 32 10MB, even though that is way too much for the singe boot loader file....)
D: Win XP (NTFS, but install this second)
E: Win 98 (FAT 32, install this first)

Or use partition magic to get the above setup working... with you current install

 

[redbeard1]

I don't use ntfs, so both my boxes are dual booting on fat32 partitions.

 

[UncleRonnie]

Hey guys, thanks for all you help. tried to make a boot file and it screwed up my comp. Luckily i recoverd my info. Anyways, saturday im am going to start from scratch.... Out of curiosity, is NTFS any more stable than FAT32 in XP? thanks

 

[redbeard1]

Ntfs is more secure, and because of how it handles the file system, XP would tend to be a bit more stable using it.

The down side, is if something happens with XP, it's tougher to get your files off because of the security, and the fact that a non XP system can't read the ntfs file format. Where if it's fat32, you can put it any windows machine and copy it off.

In my dual booting, I want access to all partitions, no matter which OS I'm booted into. Having all the partitions fat32, I can get at all the files on the XP/win2k drives.