Will Win 98 accept being installed into an extended logical drive partition with Win2K being the primary in a dual boot

[Jerry]

I have previously had Win 98 as the C drive active primary partition and Win2K being the D logical extended partition with the Windows dual boot selection being read from the C drive root directory.

On another installation, I would like to reverse it with Win 2K being the C drive, active 95% of the disk and the Win 98 being the D logical drive in the extended partition.

Obviously Win2K has no problem, but does anyone know if there is a problem with this, such as Win 98 not permitting itself to be in a logical and not in the primary (and active) partition ?

 

[Ken20]

Jerry, Let me know what you find out. I have had the same question asked of me.

 

[cleverhandle]

I can't answer your question, but I would ask why you want W98 in an extended partition. A drive can have up to four primary partitions. Might as well keep it simple.

 

[Jerry]

Cleverhandle,
I guess that is one of the reasons we have forums such as this. Thanks. I was aware of that fact but having so often created extended partitions with sometimes 10 or 12 logical partitions - extended over sometimes 4 physical drives, I had gotten used to the one primary and one large extended with many logical partitions, approach.

When going back and forth between win98, NT4, Win2k, etc. having only one primary seemed more efficient.

The question of whether Win98 will allow itself to be installed in a D partition, even if a primary, does still remain.

Thanks for you help.

 

[AluminumStudios]

Yes, you can do it, but it will be slightly tricky.

Basically if you format the primary partition as NTFS, then Windows 98 won't even see it and will assign the extended partition drive letter C. As far as I know Win9x has to be installed on C

Now the trick is formatting the primary partition as NTFS before you install Windows 98. If you install Win2K first, Win98 will blow away the boot record, so after installin 98, you will get no menu or anything, it will just boot to 98. A utility like PowerQuest Partition magic would make partitioning and formatting easy. Or if you are adventurous, install Win2K on the primary partition as NTFS, install Windows 98, then re-run the Win2K setup program and find a way to fix the boot record before you re-install Win2K (I haven't played with this too much, but it should be possible.)

 

[bacillus]

have a look at this FAQ!

 

[Jerry]

Thanks AluminumStudios, bacillus and others. It would seem the requirement that Win 98 be installed on C would be an unmovable factor, and would seal the deal, with the MBR blowaway and all.

I had wanted to be able to reformat the partition that Win98 will be in - every month or so. This so I could get a new Win 98 registry every month. But it would seem that erasing the windows98 sub-directory, within the C partition , would be sufficient, and would not tamper with the boot.ini file, as it is in the root directory and would not preclude a dual boot menu from appearing, even if Win 98 is not functional and would need to be re-installed.

If any pro sees any hole in the above, please do feel free to point it out.

Thanks.

 

[bacillus]

<< I had wanted to be able to reformat the partition that Win98 will be in - every month or so. This so I could get a new Win 98 registry every month >>


have you considered ghosting you freshly installed system as an alternative to frequent reformats??

 

[Jerry]

Damn, that IS a better idea. I had wanted to clean out the hidden registry inclusions that cannot be found by searching for the NAME of the software. But if I ghost the FRESH installation, I can just copy it back in and then reinstall the pesky software every 3-4 weeks. Thanks.

 

[AluminumStudios]

I think reloading Win98 every month or so is a bit excessive. If you don't have imaging software there is an easy alternative. Load Win98, get it all nice and neat, then make a copy of the C:\Windows and C:\Program Files directories. When Win9x starts acting up just put the copies on the C drive, go to DOS, and rename C:\Windows to something like C:\Win-bad and rename your backup copy of Windows to C:\Windows. REboot and viola, it boots into the clean copy of Windows. Once in Windows you can take care of renaming the old C:\Program Files to something else, and your backup to C:\Program Files (You can't do it from dos because of the space). It works like a charm, I do it as a precaution often when I start mucking with someones Win9X machine and it is messed up. Windows doesn't care if it boots up with the wrong copy of your Program Files directory - nothing critical starts from it in the case of a clean, fresh, copy of Windows.