Dual Boot questions

[travistee]

If I have win98se on drive C: and I want to set up a
dual boot with XPpro, I have to install XP to a different volume.

Asus P5P800, Pentium D dual core.

If my current disk is partitioned so it has two partitiions, and I add a new drive ( also two partitions), then old drive will be seen as c: and e:.
The new drive will be seen as d: and f:

So XP would be installed on d:

The old drive is IDE and the new one is SATA.

I will have to use fat32 for the new drive so win98 can see it.

So;

what happens later on if I want to remove win98?

Can I have the XP ( d:) drive set to c: ( boot drive 1 in bios) or will I have to leave it as d:
Since its not IDE, IDE1 will not be C:


Will I have problems converting everything to NTFS later on?

:rolleyes:

[confus-ed]

..Will I have problems converting everything to NTFS later on?

:rolleyes:

Yes ! Convert (the windows utility) is bad in that it produces a fixed cluster size of 512bytes instead of 4k, which means your disk will work very inefficiently & permissions etc aren't always applied as they should, (which is very important) during any upgrade, most especially with multiple profiles . Never ever convert this way, always figure out how to do a clean install & then restore any data, much better :).

By the sounds of this you need a new plan ! ;) & I'd say at least one of those includes the use of three partitions then you can leave your ide install of 98 alone, & make a seperate clean install on your new sata drive, along with a FAT32 partition for both operating systems to be able to 'see' for sharing & then decide if you want to control o/s choice via boot order in bios, or via a boot loader ..

[travistee]

The disk with win98 already has two partitions.

I will leave that one alone.

I will do a clean install of XP on the SATA drive.

If I have two partitions on the SATA drive can I have one of them as NTFS for XP and have another as FAT32?

If I keep the entire SATA drive as NTFS then XP will still see
the IDE drive, that would be ok. I don't need win98 to see the SATA drive.

I'm not familiar with the dual boot options.
"control o/s choice via boot order in bios, or via a boot loader .."

Can you clarify how the boot choices work.

I',m also not sure what will happen if I later remove win98 .

If I install XP on the SATA drive when it is drive D:, what happens after win98 is removed. Can the SATA drive be C: or does it always stay as D:?

[confus-ed]

What a lot of questions ! .. I'll just answer the last few before deciding what other ones we need to think about, as the answer to these will most likely influence what we do ..

..I'm not familiar with the dual boot options.
"control o/s choice via boot order in bios, or via a boot loader .."

Can you clarify how the boot choices work.

I',m also not sure what will happen if I later remove win98 .

If I install XP on the SATA drive when it is drive D:, what happens after win98 is removed. Can the SATA drive be C: or does it always stay as D:?

Well .. [takes a very large intake of breath indeed!] .. when you boot, what happens is that the machine does a load of self checks & then at some point it wants to pass control from its bios routines (they are finnished with) to an operating system ..

So bios does an INT 13 call {technobabble for 'finds the first sector on the first bootable disk'} & then any o/s can kick in & start up ..

Every bootable disk has what's called a bootstrap record & this can contain entries for multiple operating systems, but generally just has one, but in the case of multi-boot, what happens generally is that a little operating system choices menu pops up (the aforementioned 'bootloader'[menu]) & that makes the decision about what happens next (which o/s we will load from that disk)..

So what I'm attempting to tell you in the bit above is that you either do it this way, with a boot loader, or manually in bios by selecting the bootdisk order - so why did I tell you all of that ?

Well .. I told you because of all those questions about drive letters !! So a few facts about that ..

Only one drive may ever be active (bootable). The first active partion on the first active disk is always lettered as 'c', any subsequent operating systems will be lettered after that, & any non bootable partitions after that .. if a drive has an operating system on it it needent be lettered in the above sequence , if its been made non active [we aren't booting from it] in the bios when viewed from another o/s [its seen as a 'data disk'] ..

Which means in english, depending where we are looking from; 'c' can apply to more than one place ! A most useful or confusing fact ! :thumbs2:

So if you want to keep your drive letters as they are now in 98 & still have xp think its on 'c' too what you do, is to choose which o/s by selecting it via bootorder in bios. If you want to think too hard about all of those other drive letter questions, you use a bootloader (winxp install can add its own if it 'sees' another operating system whilst starting), but I'll say the general rule of thumb with any system drive letter (so disks with programs installed on them & 'not just data') is that whatever you install them as, is what they 'must stay as' ...

[travistee]

I found this on one of the Asus forums:

..."your hard drives are recognized and setup correctly.
That is exactly how you want your BIOS to see your SATA and PATA drives.

Now that your BIOS Setup has given you that excellent confirmation, you can forget about which is Primary and Third, and concentrate on which drive you want as the
C Drive, and the other as D Drive.
You define that in the "Boot Menu" in your BIOS Setup.

Within the Boot Menu select "Boot Device Priority".
Whichever hard drive you put before the other hard drive is going to be the C Drive.
The next hard drive will become the D Drive.
It doesn’t matter if CD or floppy drives are listed first.
The important thing is the order of the hard drives.

Be sure you install Win98se before WinXP, otherwise Win98 will destroy the WinXP boot files.
Plus when WinXP sees Win98 is already installed, WinXP will automatically setup a dual boot system for you, and provide the dual boot menu for you when you start your computer."