any safe way to dualboot between 98 & XP?

[CaelThunderwing]

to be honest, i dont know which this question belongs in (98 section or here in the XP section), outside separate drives, is there any safe way to dual boot on the same drive but by multiple partitions? the system i'd do this to doesn't have the room for 2 drives (Low profile form factor case) [Optiplex GX 260) + theres a few games that cannot be bruteforced to run w/ KernelEX that'd i'd want to run on it.

[pangoomis]

Create two partitions, one FAT32 (make sure it's less than 127GB), and one NTFS.

Install Windows 98 SE to the FAT32 partition.

Then, install Windows XP on the NTFS partition.

The Windows XP installer will automatically make a dual-boot configuration after it's done, based on the FAT32 partition, and you can select the operating systems from the boot menu.

It was designed to be that way.

To make the boot menu prettier, you can change the name of the OS'es in the boot.ini file.

[Dave-H]

Yes, I've been working that way for many years.
I also now have Windows 10 on a completely separate drive as well, but that's another story!
The important thing is that you must install Windows 98 to the boot drive C first.
Then, as said, install Windows XP to the other partition, which in my case is drive D.
My Windows XP drive is actually FAT32, which works fine, and this gives a small advantage in that Windows 98 can access that drive easily if needed without having to have one of the Windows 98 NTFS drivers installed.

Edited June 20, 2019 by Dave-H
Addition

[404notfound]

I wholeheartedly recommend Grub4DOS bootloader.

[Dave-H]

Going off-topic, but Grub4DOS bootloader was recommended to me a few years ago as a possible answer to adding Windows 10 to the Windows 98/Windows XP setup on my machine.
At the moment I can dual boot freely between 98 and XP using the normal dual boot interface, but Windows 10 can't be added to that as both Windows 98 and Windows 10 seem to have to be installed on the C boot drive or they won't work, so to switch between 98/XP and 10 I have to reboot, go into the BIOS, and change the boot drive.
This works fine, but is a bit of a pain!
I guess Grub4DOS won't fix that, I could see no way when I looked into it before.
FWIW I've never seen any problem in just using the MS provided dual boot interface between 98 and XP.

[dencorso]

Grub4DOS can not only boot from different partitions in different HDDs, obviating the need to go into BIOS, but also can do it in an unobtrusive way, from a DOS config.sys menu, inside the Win 98 partition. If you want to try that I can guide you along the process. I reccomend GRUB4DOS 0.4.5c 2015-12-31 for the task: while there're surely newer builds, that's the one I'm using from release time and I know for a fact it'll do the job, all right. In case you want to take the plunge, do let me know.

[rloew]

I have a partitioning tool that can support 60 separate Operating Systems in one Drive. My main system has Windows 95, 98, ME, 7, 8, and 10 in one Drive.

[RainyShadow]

For triple boot 98-XP-10 you can try to copy the Boot folder and bootmgr of Win10 to the C: drive. Then use BootICE to edit the BCD file in this folder. Fix the entry for Win10 and add another one for the ntldr of XP. After that change the PBR of the C: partition to bootmgr.

If this works properly, you should get a menu to either boot directly to Win10, or open a second menu to select between XP and 98.

[Dave-H]

17 hours ago, rloew said:

I have a partitioning tool that can support 60 separate Operating Systems in one Drive. My main system has Windows 95, 98, ME, 7, 8, and 10 in one Drive.

Now that's just showing off!

[rloew]

13 hours ago, Dave-H said:

Now that's just showing off!

Not really. I didn't mention that there are two independent copies of 95, and of 10, and several of 98SE. I also forgot the two copies of XP.

[Dave-H]

8 hours ago, rloew said:

Not really. I didn't mention that there are two independent copies of 95, and of 10, and several of 98SE. I also forgot the two copies of XP.

[RainyShadow]

On 6/20/2019 at 10:35 PM, rloew said:

I have a partitioning tool that can support 60 separate Operating Systems in one Drive. My main system has Windows 95, 98, ME, 7, 8, and 10 in one Drive.

Let me guess - you have 60 logical partitions and map the one you boot as primary?

I think the same can be achieved with GRUB4DOS

[rloew]

11 hours ago, RainyShadow said:

Let me guess - you have 60 logical partitions and map the one you boot as primary?

I think the same can be achieved with GRUB4DOS

No. I have about 20 Primary Partitions and 10 Logical Partitions in  one chain.

My multi-profile MBR chooses one of a set of conventional MBRs to boot from.

I have not worked with GRUB4DOS, so I am not sure what it can do.

[jaclaz]

I only have 55 different Operating systems using grub4dos, but that is only an artificial limitation I imposed myself, because of the way I number them (in base 13).

jaclaz

[rloew]

The design limit of RFDISK is a total of 61 profiles and overlays.