Poppa Bear
Posts: 228 +9
As a matter of general interest, for the sake of posterity. Who am I kidding... I'm showing off! This is my only claim to fame in the world of PCs.
Going back a few years to the dark ages of Win98, as a sign of goodwill by Microsoft, I was given a free "consultation" with a Microsoft techo re loading multiple OSs on one PC. I was told it was not possible to make the system work unless I loaded Win98 first, when later versions of Windows, such as XP, were to be added. Win98 had to occupy the 1st partition on the hard drive.
Just for the hell of it, I wanted to see if it was possible to get around this and load WinXP first, and then Win98. For anyone who's interested, I was able to do this using the following method.
1. Create two partitions on the hard drive, with the 1st partition vacant and the 2nd formatted as NTFS.
2. Load WinXP on the 2nd partition. The boot material is loaded into the 1st partiton.
3. Use third party software such as Partition Magic to split the first vacant partition into two partitons, with the 1st partition formatted by Partition Magic as FAT32. The boot files are preserved in the second partiton. You now have: 1st partition FAT32 empty. 2nd partiton boot files. 3rd partition XP OS.
4. Set up a Boot Manager using 3rd party software such as Boot Magic. If you don't, the boot set up by Win98 will over-ride the XP boot and you won't be able to get back into XP.
5. Load Win98 onto the 1st partition and add it to the menu of the Boot Manager, and hey presto!
Note: If XP was simply loaded straight onto the hard drive without first creating 2 partitons, it was then not possible to create a FAT32 partition located in the first position on the hard drive ahead of the new 2nd partiton which contained XP. In this scenario, a 2nd partition could only be created by using the vacant space after the primary XP partition. In other words, the XP OS could not be moved to the right into a new partition.
Hope this may have been of some interest to those who have played around with multiple partitons and operating systems.
Going back a few years to the dark ages of Win98, as a sign of goodwill by Microsoft, I was given a free "consultation" with a Microsoft techo re loading multiple OSs on one PC. I was told it was not possible to make the system work unless I loaded Win98 first, when later versions of Windows, such as XP, were to be added. Win98 had to occupy the 1st partition on the hard drive.
Just for the hell of it, I wanted to see if it was possible to get around this and load WinXP first, and then Win98. For anyone who's interested, I was able to do this using the following method.
1. Create two partitions on the hard drive, with the 1st partition vacant and the 2nd formatted as NTFS.
2. Load WinXP on the 2nd partition. The boot material is loaded into the 1st partiton.
3. Use third party software such as Partition Magic to split the first vacant partition into two partitons, with the 1st partition formatted by Partition Magic as FAT32. The boot files are preserved in the second partiton. You now have: 1st partition FAT32 empty. 2nd partiton boot files. 3rd partition XP OS.
4. Set up a Boot Manager using 3rd party software such as Boot Magic. If you don't, the boot set up by Win98 will over-ride the XP boot and you won't be able to get back into XP.
5. Load Win98 onto the 1st partition and add it to the menu of the Boot Manager, and hey presto!
Note: If XP was simply loaded straight onto the hard drive without first creating 2 partitons, it was then not possible to create a FAT32 partition located in the first position on the hard drive ahead of the new 2nd partiton which contained XP. In this scenario, a 2nd partition could only be created by using the vacant space after the primary XP partition. In other words, the XP OS could not be moved to the right into a new partition.
Hope this may have been of some interest to those who have played around with multiple partitons and operating systems.
