booting XP and 98

[iainIOW]

Hi,
My PC has two hard drives. One is installed with windows XP pro, and the other with win 98SE. I need to set the boot Options so I can choose which OS I start my PC in. I have tried to edit he boot.ini file to look like this

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 98" /fastdetect

All I get is an error message when I select windows 98 on the boot menu, it is looking for hal.dll (which I think is an XP component). The structure of my PC, is a 60 gigg harddrive partitioned in to two parts (XP is on partition 1) on a controller card (jumper set to primary) and a 12 gig slave drive also sitting on the controller card. The 12 gig is not partitioned. How can I get the boot menu to work, as I really need access to both O/S.

 

[wolluf]

To get XP's boot loader to boot 98, you need to install XP with 98 already installed on the first drive/partition (theis creates a file called bootsect.dos - image of 98 boot sector, and puts entry C:\="Microsoft Windows" in boot.ini. What you've added doesn't work because its only for NT based o/s). From your description, you don't appear to have.

Some options:-

1. Use a third party boot manager - I use

http://www.boot-us.com,

free for personal use. With your setup, just need to install its GUI in either XP or 98, then run to create boot menu. Its straightforward and reliable (my preference).

2.

http://www.petri.co.il/install_win98_after_xp.htm

has method to create bootsect.dos.

3. Just change the bios settings (to boot from first or second hard drive - or C/D or whatever it calls them) each time you want to change boot. Clumsy, but works.

4. Do a repair reinstal of XP (will only lose windows updates) to create XP boot loader dual boot -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341