Adventures In Dual Booting

[Widow 0]

Just wanted to share my experience with setting up a dual booting system. Windows 2000/Windows 98. I have been running windows 2000 for well over a year and really like it; but I do miss being able to play some older games now and then. I tried setting up a dual boot system a while back using a guide I found on one of the major tweak sites and it was nothing short of a disaster. Well since then I have found an easier way for those of us who want the best of both worlds but don't want to be spending an eternity trying to make it work.

 

1. First off make sure that if your hard drives are partitioned they are partitioned so that the space you plan on using for windows 98 is a primary partition and not an extended partition. This can be easily found out through the windows 2000 computer management console. Once your partition is ready just format it to fat32.

(Actually with windows 2000 its a good idea to make all partitions primary and get away from using extended partitions all together)

 

2. You will need to have a windows 98 boot disk handy with system files and the sys.com file on it. If you don't have one any longer go here to get one:

http://www.bootdisk.com/

 

3. You will need to download some time of boot manager; there are many, I personnaly use Bootstar Bootmanager(its a great little $20 program, takes almost no thought to use...which is good for me.)

http://www.star-tools.com/

There are many others including some freeware ones, just remember you always get what you pay for!

 

4. After you have make you 98 boot disk and installed your boot manager you can reboot your system to the 98 boot disk. The boot disk will only recognize the fat32 partition you created so all you need to do is to transfer the system to C:

 

5. After the system is transferred just set up 98 as usual. Note: At least when using Bootstar the inital boot screen did not come up

after I installed 98 and I had to use the rescue disk one time to fix it. After that upon every boot up it pops up a boot menu for you to choose from.

 

6. All in all it was very simple to do. A couple of quick notes for anyone wanting to try this. 1. Remember windows 98 cannot see NTFS partitions so if you need some files that are on your win2k partitions you will need to copy them to the win98 partition while in windows 2k. 2. If you install norton utilites for windows 98 DO NOT under any circumstances use disk doctor to repair partitions(disk doctor likes to pop up a windows and ask you if you are having trouble accessing other partitions) as long as you always answer no to this you should be fine, speedisk and all other norton utilities work as normal.

 

Now all those old games I have lying around are getting played again, it has really worked out well and now I have the best of both worlds.

 

Btw: Total time to set up and install windows 98 with a dual boot was just under an hour.

[Brian Frank 0]

One note: you don't need to download any bootloader to get this to work. You can just boot off the Win2k CD, and choose the repair option. You don't need to have an ERD either, just choose the options that don't require you to insert a disk, and use the 'Fast' repair. Reboot once its all done, and you have the bootloader.

If you don't like the settings, you can right click my computer, go to properties>advanced>startup and recovery for the options to change the time out and default OS.

 

Everything else is good to go, BTW. Just letting you know of a built in option. Got the info out of a MS Res. Kit book.