Dual boot in XP and 98SE

[toyumail]

Hi, I have two harddisks installed in my pc. One is 40GB as master and the other one is 8GB as a slave. I have partitioned the 40GB into c: and d:, and the 8GB as e:. All in NTFS format. The c: is currently installed with XP and is running smoothly.

Now i would like to install windows 98SE into my e: partition and have a dual boot option when the pc boots. I know this is possible but not sure what is the proper precedures/steps to do all this. Please help and advice. Thanks in advance.

[not important]

I read the post wrong.

[DragonNOA1]

The way I would do it, which I'm sure there are better ways, is to disconnect the first drive (C: & D: ) and make E: fat32. Then install 98 onto E: and once everything is set up correctly slave the XP HD onto the 98SE and run XP's recovery console from the CD and type "fixmbr". All should be good.

[bailey]

be aware that w98se will not see the ntfs partition

[toyumail]

Thanks for the reply. But is that slave the XP HD onto the 98SE will mean i have to set the jumper for the 8GB HD as master? i prefer the xp HD as the master (as it is now) and not messing around with the hardware stuff, is it possible?

98SE not seeing the NTFS partition should be ok for me though.

[DragonNOA1]

There is no way that I know of other than the way I described b/c you cannot install new OS's (XP) and then an old OS (98). If you are worried about what it boots into, you can have the 98 as master and still boot straight into XP. If you just don't want to mess with the hardware though, I know of no other way sorry.

[Confused]

You could change the 8G drive to FAT32 and install WIN98 and do a Google search for boot loaders.

You have to have a boot loader if running multiple OS's. If you had installed WIN98 first and then XP, it would have created one for you. But doing it the other way around is a bit more complicated but can be done. Either with a 3rd party boot loader or running XP repair as Dragon outlined.
Chas

PS
Unless you have a specific need, it isn't worth the trouble. It will require a reboot any time you switch OS's. Any programs that you want to run on both will have to be loaded on both and updates applied to both. When I first went to XP over two years ago I set up a dua boot. Never booted to WIN98 after initial setup. Just wasted HD space that I could have used.

[toyumail]

Thanks guys. I have Partition Magic 8 and there is actually a program called Boot Manager that i think i might give it a try.(only know about this program after a few googled on boot loaders).

Well, i do have a reason to use win98 as some of the expensive softwares i bought few years ago just won't run properly in xp unless i upgrade some hardware stuff. Other than that, most of my programs will run only in xp, so i hope there won't be any redundancy in applying updates.

Thanks again.