Dual Boot

[Ferral]

Ok ! I've decided to dual boot my PC with XP and Win98, just so I can play through some of my old games again. Things like Indy : Infernal Machine, Blood 2 etc.

I dual booted a few years back but just cant remember what I done and how I done it.

A : I dont want to have to format
B : Partioning via FDISK is not a viable option as I will lose all my data stored on my current D partition.
C : Dont want to have to format just to set up a dual boot system.

So, can you guys help me find a program (think I used Partition Magic last time but cant find my disks to it now ) that does the above mentioned so I can get 98 on and start some retro gaming !

Also I need to know how to go about doing it as I just cant remember and dont want to lose all my data understandably

Cheers

Ferral

[peterb]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...multiboot.mspx

[0iD]

Try Acronis O/S selector if you can't find boot magic. Far be it from me to suggest sending you a highly illegal pirate copy of my copy.... perish the thought.

[Ferral]

Split my C drive in 2 so I have a formatted 2 Gb partition for Windows Me now(H Drive ! ), last time I done this I just installed the 2nd OS and it put a boot selection on startup after it posted, going to do it tonight and see how things go.

Thankfully I still use FAT 32 so this should go with no probs, yeah I have XP installed already but putting Me on should be a doddle and shouldnt overwrite anything its not supposed to.

I found my partition magic version 6 on 2 floppies last night so at least I've got started ! Bit of luck after I have installed the 2nd OS the Guild Wars live update will be ready to go !

[directhex]

Originally Posted by Ferral

putting Me on should be a doddle and shouldnt overwrite anything its not supposed to.

unfortunately, all DOS-based windowses, like ME, are designed to cause problems dual-booting

1) DOS can *only* boot from c:\ - if yours says it's elsewhere, it's installed a couple of critical files to the real c:\, and if those go missing you won't be able to boot anymore
2) DOS-based windowses will automatically remove any dual booting capability they find. You can put back the Windows NT boot loader by booting from an NT5 CD, going to the recovery console, and typing 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' - these should allow you back into your NT-based OS, where you can edit c:\boot.ini if needed to give the second boot option.

if you want to boot DOS and NT on the same system, you really really want to install the DOS-based on first, to the first partition, to avoid untold amounts of pain

[Ferral]

Sorted it now, biggest problem I found was actually finding my driver disk for my Soundblaster Live 5.1, all the web drivers just wernt working !

Installed Me which completely disabled my XP so I chucked in my XP disk and done a repair install and it pulled up my boot menu so now I have the 2 operating systems on.

Managed to find the Blood 2 patch version 2.0 and got that so hopefully I can get that up and running smoothly as its showing my mouse pointer ingame and wont accelerate the graphics ! Modern hardware, wholl have it !