I forgot how to do dual boot!

[Tannin]

It's been so long since I was asked to do a dual boot setup that I can't remember how to do it! Customer has a decent machine (Athlon XP something-or-other) and wants us to install a shiny new copy of Win XP on it (to replace the pirated one that the kids put on). I'll be upgrading it to a new 200GB drive and 512MB of DDR.

Youngest son needs Win 98 to play old games on that don't work under Win XP, so we need to do a dual boot: Win98/Win XP. I can rememnber that I used to have a clear idea of the best way to do this so that it was pretty much idiot-proof, but I can't remember what it was! The 200GB drive is blank at present, so I can partition & format any way I like.

Some kind soul with a longer memory than mine please remind me.

 

[timwhit]

Make sure you install Windows 98 first.

Here is a guide you can follow: http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/dualboot.htm

Have fun with that one.

 

[paugie]

Ha! Tony. I'm 51, so I thoroughly understand what's happening :mrgrn:

Yep, install '98 first.

 

[Tannin]

Thankyou Tim and Paugie, I'm on the way with it. Win 98 install complete, XP to do a little later. I partitioned the drive 10GB/190GB (we hardly need any room for old 98 games, probably 3GB would have been enough) and I'll convert the 190GB D drive to NTFS so that Win 98 can't tell it's there.

Funny how you ... er ... you know ... that thing you do woith your mind when you can't .... er ... things that happened a while ago and you knew about them but now all of a sudden you ... can't think of the word ... Oh yes, forget!

 

[mubs]

I'm presuming XP's boot files will be on the 190GB partition. If so will XP boot? IIRC a bootable partition has to start before the 8GB boundary for Windows OSes.

 

[Tannin]

Yes and yes, Mubs. It works just fine. 10GB FAT32 Win98 partition, 190GB NTFS WinXP partition. Thankyou for your help gentlemen, customer has gone happy ... and it's time I did the same.

 

[Explorer]

...IIRC a bootable partition has to start before the 8GB boundary for Windows OSes.

This is NOT the case with Windows XP or Windows 2000 using NTFS.

As for Windows NT 4.0 and earlier NT versions (NTFS, HPFS, or FAT) as well as Windows ME/9x, YES this is the case! These operating systems did not support INT13 extensions, so, if boot code/data existed beyond the hard drive's first 8 gigabytes, you could not boot -- even if you had "modern" hardware that fully supported INT13 extensions.

 

[mubs]

Thanks for the clarification, Gary, that's good to know. It means I can fool around with my PC even more! (Have W98 at the beginning of the disk, followed by W2k. Now I can install WXP next! Yes, I'm a masochist.)

 

[Explorer]

Actually, I faintly recall that starting with either Windows 98 or Windows 98 SE, you could boot on a "large" partition, since INT13 extensions were supported at that point in time -- which would make Windows ME also capable of such. Even though Windows 95 OEM2 supported FAT32, it did not support INT13 extensions. Windows 98 did, and, I believe before the release of Win98 SE.