WinXP SP3 on Second Drive with Win98 & PC DOS 7.01

[aoresteen]

I am building a DOS & Win98SE game machine.  The computer has 2 IDE drives.  Drive0 has a 2GB FAT partition for DOS and a 8GB FAT32 partition for Win98SE.  The second hard drive drive (DRIVE1) has a 2GB FAT partition for DOS data and a 6GB FAT32 for Win98 data/programs.

I installed WinXP SP3 into the DRIVE1's FAT32.  XP boots fine as does Win98SE from XP's BOOT.INI.  DOS also boots fine if I set it's partition to ACTIVE and by-pass XP's BOOT.INI.

When I boot to WinXP the C: drive is the Win98 boot partition with the Win98 WINDOWS directory but the BOOT drive is E: with the Windows XP.  CD-ROM drive is F: .This is confusing but since I will use XP only for diagnostics/browsing I won't bother switching the XP drive letters around.

QUESTION 1:  How do I add PC-DOS to XP's BOOT.INI screen and get DOS to boot?

QUESTION 2: What files does XP put on DRIVE0 and where?

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

[jaclaz]

Question 1:

You are not providing enough information for a "simple" answer.

You need to specifiy if partitions are primary, which one(s) is normally active, how exactly (and in which order) you installed the various OS's, etc., etc.

Are you sure-sure you want PC-DOS (which is not MS-DOS):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_DOS

Also, exact version of the DOS (whichever is it) is important, a "normal" DOS+Win98 machine is usually a DOS 7.1 machine with Windows 98 on top of it (or, if you prefer, it is viceversa a Windows 98 install with a DOS 7.1 command line only booting mode) if you want to have other versions of "full" DOS, such as 6.22 or PC-DOS (or FREEDOS, etc. ) things might soon become complex and you might want to use different approaches (usually involving more "complete" bootmanages such as grub4dos).

Question 2:

See question 1, XP normally puts in the Active, Primary partititon of first disk:

NTLDR
BOOT.INI
NTDETECT.COM

on some machines only (SCSI, usually) a NTBOOTDD.SYS  

 

Usually, in a simple setup such as yours, the mechanism provided by XP (NTLDR+BOOT.INI) is enough to make multiboot, you will need anyway good ol' Bootpart:

to manage the options and add what you are missing more easily:

https://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

NTLDR is at the same time the NT LoaDeR and a (primitive) bootmanager, but it is enough, on a properly installed/setup system you shouldn't ever need to change which one is the active partition, Gilles Voillant's advice (the Author of bootpart above) has been since the dawn of time (bootpart was developed for WINNT 3.5) has always been to have a smallish primary FAT partition for DOS and for the NTLDR/BOOT.INI, then you might have lots of variations for "all the rest".

jaclaz

Edited July 30, 2019 by jaclaz