Setting up a dual-boot with 98 and XP

[cigarman]

I want to setup my main hard drive as a dual-boot of win98 and XP. I know I'll have to re-format it and create two partitions, but can anyone offer me a good link of a sort of step by step process for doing this correctly? Or if you want to take the time to spell it out here that would be fine, but I wouldn't expect that.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Arcanum]

First make sure you have two partitions as you said.
One MUST be FAT32 - this will be for Win98, the other can be either FAT32 or NTFS, but I sincerely recommend for also FAT32 - this is for WinXP.

Why FAT32 with WinXP?
Simple, if something gets f'upped you can boot into Win98 and try to sort it out from there. If the XP is on an NTFS partition you wont even see the partition under Win98 - as Win98 cannot even 'see' (access, write or read) NTFS!

Ok, now that we got that covered... Install Win98 now.
When you're finished setting it up, continue to booting XP cd and installing XP on another partition.
The dual-boot will be set automatically.

Enjoy!

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

Boot the PC up with the Win 98 startup disk and use fdisk to create 2 partitions and then format all the partitions using the format command. Then install win 98 on one and XP on the other.

 

[cigarman]

computer would see it like two hard drives then?

Thanks for the replies.

Once the dual-boot is set up, in order to boot up to either of the two partitions I would have to re-order the boot sequence accordingly in the bios then, right? I take it then that the two partitions on the same hard drive will be interpreted by the computer as two separate hard drives?

 

[Arcanum]

Nope, two partitions are two partitions and will be seen by the PC just like that - 2 partitions on 1 drive.
You can keep all the BIOS settings you have now, there's no need to chage everything, Windows install does everything to set up the dual boot automatically.

 

[wlknaack]

Here is a good start to understanding multi-booting:

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/index.htm#ptedit