Multiple operating systems

[littlewill]

HI

My main PC runs XP on one physical hard drive. I want to be familiar with 98 and 2000. If I buy another internal drive partition it in FAT32, set is a slave on the same IDE controller will it cause no grief to the master drive formated in NTFS?
I am correct in thinking that none of the operating systems will interfere with each other?



Thanks for looking
Littlewill

[directhex]

you'd think there'd be no interference. unfortunately, you want windows 98. windows 98, a pretty front end for msdos, will only boot from the first partition of the first hard disk (which must be fat16 or fat32) - you can ask it to install elsewhere, but it will a) install crucial files to that first partiton (and die if it's an ntfs drive) and b) it will remove all ability to boot other oses it finds.

[littlewill]

Thanks for the advice.
Sorry if this sounds stupid but could I swop my current master to slave and put the new hard drive in as master and then format that as FAT32 for 98 and 2000?

Littlewill

[directhex]

yes, but most of your programs would stop working, due to the change in drive letter.

[Paul Adams]

If it is just to "get to know" Windows 98 and 2000 rather than use them in anger, try out Virtual PC 2004.

There is a trial version you can play with for 45 days, but for every guest OS you install you must have a licence, and you'll need a chunk of memory (and a decent CPU) to run multiple machines at the same time.
Trial download here

This is much safer than blitzing your entire PC, and messing about recabling.
Basically the application emulates a fixed set of hardware (S3 Trio graphics card, SB16 sound card, Intel 100Mbps network cards (up to 4)) and you can mount ISO images from your host OS to install apps and such.

This is what I've been using to create my unattended installation DVD and test it out without wasting discs.


Here is a (1600x1200) pic of my main rig running XP Pro SP2 as the host OS and Longhorn and another instance of XP Pro SP2 as guest OSs:
279k image

At work there is a server running 6 instances of Windows 2003 on one box

(Note: Running XP SP2 guests is slow without Virtual PC 2004 SP1, which isn't out just yet)

[littlewill]

Thanks for the advice people!

[Moby-Dick]

or use mbootmagic - I sucessfully used it to dualboot 95 and 98 on my dads old pc

[directhex]

vmware will do the same job as veepc, with slightly higher performance, though i prefer the virtualpc ui.

i agree it's a good idea, though