Dual boot?

[JimZap]

I have two hard drives installed on my pc. One has Win 98 from an old pc the other Win xp. How can I boot with the win 98 so I can use my scanner (no driver exists that will allow me to use it on xp )?

 

[wolluf]

The XP is primary master?

I'd suggest a boot manager -

http://www.boot-us.com

(free for personal use). Just install its GUI on XP, then run it to set up boot menu (you can save this in mbr, floppy or spare partition slot).

PS. Was the 98 installed with drive in this machine? If not, you may have some problems when it first boots (because it will need to load new drivers for hardware in this machine). It may or may not do this successfully.

 

[JimZap]

Xp is the primary and 98 is a slave that was installed while on the old pc.

Is there any way I can boot from the 98 without first booting up from the xp?

The 98 contains all the drivers I need.

 

[JeffPr]

In orde to alleviate this problem you can download a boot manager to help you, although there is probably an easier way to do it. I would go into windows XP and edit your boot.ini file which is under C:\boot.ini. By editing this file, you can have a screen come up and ask you if you want to boot win98 or windows XP. I am not sure if you can do this in win98, although I am sure you can. I've enclosed a copy of my boot.ini file so you can see the changes you have to make, you basically just have to tell it where the partition for your winXP (or win98) is. As for your driver situation, I had the same problem. All my drivers were under my windows XP Home and I wanted to install windows XP Pro and have everything to work. A mr. castner told me of this wonderful program that searches your hard drive and takes any available drivers and puts them into a folder called "drivers". All you do then is go under system in the control panel (in winXP) and install all the drivers for your devices manually from the folder "drivers" which you can copy to your XP partition. Works like a top for me. Here is the link.

http://www.jermar.com/wdrvbck.htm

If you do download this program it makes a bunch of subfolders for each device and this can cause some problems during installation. Just go into each folder and copy the contents into one master driver folder so all the .inf and .sys (and sometimes .dll) files are all in one folder for all your devices, this will help you immensely (well it did for me anyway).
Good luck and ask more questions if you have any problems.
regards


boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons

Do you think your friend could feed my cat? Heisenberg wasn't sure. ~ Erwin Schrodinger talking of his revolutionary paradox

 

[wolluf]

JimZap,

You only install the boot-us GUI in XP - then run that to set up a boot menu which allows you to choose which operating system boots (ie, you don't have to boot XP to get to 98). Very straightforward - takes 2 or 3 minutes to setup.

Note: You can't just edit boot.ini to add 98 to XP's boot menu (you need to go through several other processes too - boot-us is much simpler).