dual boot issues

Tried to get the information I needed from older threads but couldn't find exactly what I needed. I have a two hard drive system and was run winXP as an operating system. I now need to have an older environment for some development work so I needed to be able to dual boot my system with XP and 98. Here is what I have done so far. I opened my case and set my "storage" hard drive as master and removed my drive that has XP on it. I installed 98 normally and then put the hard drives back the way I had them. So I have XP on my master "C:" drive and 98 on my "D:" drive. At this point windowsXP boots normaly but did not give a dual boot option. So I edited my boot.ini file so I would have a "windows 98" option. It took me two tries to get the right configuration so the second boot option would point at the correct hard drive.

it looks like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="windows 98" /fastdetect


Now it will at least go to the correct hard drive when booting, but now I get an error that says it cannot find "hal.dll" when I try to boot to the hard drive with win98. Now I know that hal.dll is a file specific to winXP and that it would cause serious issues if it was part of my 98 dev environment. What I need to know is what I need to do to fix this boot situation. Preferably something easy. IE I don't want to reinstall anything and I would prefer to leave the hard drives the way they are.

Now if it is true that I have to have 98 on the "master" drive then what files do I need to copy from the XP side to the 98 side besides boot.ini and what directory do they go in so the dual boot feature continues to work?

Thanks in advance.

I think that Win9x requires to be installed on the first partition of the first hard drive, so you'd have to swap the drives. From there, you need to install WinXP's bootloader onto Win98's drive. I think you can boot off your WinXP CD with the hard drives in the new arrangement and tell it to repair the installation. I think that will reinstall the bootloader in the proper place, but I've never had the need to try it.

I have seen some posts that said it must be on the first drive, but they also mentioned that several files needed to be copied over. What are these files and where do they go, or what are the steps needed when you boot from the winXP cd to have it install the boot options on the first hard drive which will now be the one with 98 on it?

Thanks

The big deal is, you can't just copy files. It has to install the boot loader in the master boot record (MBR) of the drive, which isn't exactly drag and drop. I've never actually had to reinstall the bootloader, but I've heard you can do it (somehow) when booting from the XP installation CD. Google around and maybe something'll come up.

yeah one site mentioned that you can boot with the winXP cd and go to the repair section instead of instal, then select the win98 os if it shows up (should if I have it as master drive and xp as secondary). Then log in and and do fixboot ... but none of this seemed really clear. And atm I am too lazy to open my box up and change my 98 to primary then try to get the boot loader set up and all. Maybe after I finish my crossword, then I will post my results so maybe others will get a clearer picture than I did.

Golly Zorlock, you like reinventing the wheel?

Tons of how to's out there covering multiboot.

You first mistake was redoing your hardware. Your second was thinking a ARC path could load a msdos.sys based OS [windows]

Let's start with clarifing that yes it is nice if you install the older OS first then the newer BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO.

Second VERY IMPORTANT ISSUE is that the OS registry's store pointers BY DRIVE LETTER. So your swapping drives around was never going to end well. This is why you don't change your hardware and install in succession until complete.

To make this short, your next step is to reinstall 98 on the d: drive ASSUMING your XP drive is FAT32. This won't work if its NTFS since 98 can't write to a NTFS file system.

You will find after you have installed 98 that you no longer boot into XP. No big deal. This is where you start the XP install and choose repair. Run fixboot. This will restore your multiboot.

The correct entry for any msdos.sys based OS [9x/ME/DOS] is c:\="Windows XX". You would NOT use ARC since this is NOT a ntldr based OS [NT/W2K/XP/03]. A proper msdos.sys file will point to the drive of the 9x installation by drive letter in the path section.

FYI

Ok now I am completely confused.

I tried reading all the how too documents that I could find doing a google seach and most of them seemed incomplete, but the one thing they all said is that 98 had to be on the C: drive (i.e. the master drive) So what you are saying wanderer is that I should have left my drives set up the way they were ( C: "master" as my curent XP installation and D: as my second drive), then install 98 on my D: drive, but most of the how too docs said that I could not do it that way. Right now I have 98 as master ( C: drive) and XP as slave ( D: drive). I can boot to 98 just fine but was currently in the process of trying to figure out how to get a boot loader running. All is not lost though since the XP drive can still be switch to master and boot normally. If you do know of any guides that would be helpful, but I am leary about having my XP drive in while 98 installs since I don't want it overwriting anything on that drive. I guess what I was trying to do is what some people had mentioned that they had done this with drives out of two different computers. i.e. they had XP on one machine and 98 on another and wanted to put the 98 drive in their XP machine and dual boot with that. If anyone knows of a guide or could write me a quick how to with these conditions:

XP running on the master drive as C:
a second clean drive in D:
where D: is the intended install path of win98

My worry is that I don't remember anywhere where I could select the install drive for win98 and that it might try to overwrite what is on my main drive.

The other solution would be figuring out how to get a boot loader running so I can select operating systems. Maybe now with 98 running as my main drive I can install bootmagic (since it is a win98 version and get it to allow me to select boot drives).

Yes, I guess I am reinventing the wheel but I never found any good examples of what I wanted to do.

I also guess I still need help.

The boot loader for Win98 AND WinXP must be on the C drive. Win98 overwrites the XP boot loader, but XP does not overwrite the 98 loader (or at least does not disable it), which is why you should install 98 first. Also, 98 runs best if its boot loader is on the save drive with the OS, hence the recommendation to put 98 on C. However, you CAN do it. You can also install 98 after XP IF you have a free FAT partition AND you fix the XP boot loader. I found a fix that works nicely here:

URL

I ran 98/2000/XP on one system for awhile with no trouble. But of course, I did it the "right" way -- 98 first, then 2000, then XP. When I upgraded to ME for an article, I fully expected to corrupt my boot loader and have to fix it, but to my surprise, 2000 and XP never missed a beat and I still boot all three (now ME/2000/XP) just fine.

And these are on LOGICAL drives, not PHYSICAL. No need to change the master/slave designation. That has nothing to do with it. It's really easier than most folks think.

Good luck.

After rereading your post, why don't you just reinstall XP on the D drive? That should fix the boot loader. No reason to mess with 98 since it is already on the C drive and boots fine.

When I had problems with my Win2K installation and couldn't boot in from my multi-boot config, I reinstalled (repaired) it and it didn't mess with 98 or XP but now boots fine.