To Dual Boot, or Not to Dual Boot?

[Carbo]

Presently running W98SE. I have in my grubby lil' fingers W2K Pro.
I've got a P3/500, 256MB RAM, and a IBM 75GXP 46G hard drive. I'm thinking of dual booting to compare OS's. For those of you who have, have you found it advantageous to do so, or more trouble than it's worth. The one confusion I have: the drivers, and non-MS programs I run are for W98. How does a dual boot setup affect this? Is one OS the default when opening one of these programs or, say, the printer or scanner? Thank you.

 

[MrGrim]

If the two O/S are on different partitions or even physical drives they don't interact with each other. When your computer boots you select which O/S you want to use and that's it. It's as if you never installed the other O/S in which you didn't boot into.

 

[Horsepower]

I previously dual booted 5 oses using BootIt. When I built my new box, I made the default hard drive removeable, and have different hard drives for the different oses. FWIW

 

[Carbo]

This would be set up on one, permanently attached hard drive. I'd be using Partition Magic/Boot Magic 6.0 and have the two OS's on two separate partitions. So, if I understand correctly, when I want to run a program which requires, say, W98, then it will automatically run off of that OS. As well, if I need to use the printer and the driver is based on W98, again, it will know to go to the correct OS. Is that right?

 

[dudleydocker]

bump

 

[Topochicho]

Each OS is completely indipendent. If you install in one OS you will not be be installed in the other. Some programs don't really care about the registry or system files and don't need it (microstation is a good proffesional example). You can install it under 2000, and then under 98 (provided you use compatible file systems ie:fat32) you go to the install dir and create a link the exe, and it never matters runs fine under either OS. Other programs need the Reg and system files but don't do anything OS specific in thier home directories, so you can install under 2000, then you have to install again under 98, but you can go into the same directory and install over the 2000 install. This will allow the program to run from either os, but only have one install. The last and worst, is the ones that do os specific stuff in thier home directory. These require 2 completely seperate installs to work.

I have personally found that multiple OS's are just a pain, unless they are unrelated, like 2000, and linux. I use 2000 at work for the stability and power,and 98se at home for the speed and compatibility.

 

[slurp]

On bootup, you have to choose which you are going to boot into. Usually, you would select one as your default boot OS. You must also remember, install WIN98SE first, and WIN2K afterward. As both programs are on different partitions, you can have each with the native drivers for that OS, and congigure your printer and/or scanner for both. Also, if you want the two to recognize each other, you must have both partitions formatted with FAT32.

 

[Riverhound]

Not sure if it is supposed to happen but once I dual booted I could no longer use my win2k hard drive form 98. Must be because of the file system but if you need it you might want to do somethign else.

 

[apoppin]

i'd like to do further research on partitioning and dual booting. Are there any good recommended web sites or books that deal with this in depth? (Too much info is piecemeal on the forums.)

 

[clutz123]

i second apoppin. any good sites on dual booting? cnet.com helped a little. trying to do this on a laptop, don't want to screw anything up TOO bad...

 

[aznmoshboy]

I have a dual boot configuration with Win98 and Win2000 Professional (both FAT32) and it works fine. I used Partition Magic 6 to make a primary and logical drive on my hard drive, installed win2000 on my logical, and windows automatically turns on dual boot when it detects two or more OS's. *If you don't know, the dual boot screen is just a black screen giving you a choice for OS's.*