dual boot of win98-winxp

[duecekd]

I'm raw here and don't go for avatars and smiley faces, but I have read alot of your guys stuff, and am very impressed with the knowledge.

I have a AMD athlon XP 2000+ running on a Kt333 soyo board. I have 2 HDD's, 1 w/win98 and 1 w/winXP pro. Both can boot on their own and have all programs and drivers installed. I would like to boot from either and would like your suggestions on either a boot manager or a better way of setting up the system.

Any help would be appreciated,

Thank you.

[SiMoNsAyS]

this is what i did:

c:\ - win98se - fat32

d:\ - winxp - ntfs

all the programs must be installed twice on C:\program files.

with this config you don't waste space installing the same programs on different locations. win98 is installed first and xp will set properly the boot config so you'll be able to boot from it.

to don't mess things d: partition will be invisible for 98se. the default boot manager of xp always worked flawlessly for me

ps: btw, welcome to the forum

[soldier1st]

install 98 then xp or if you do it another way you'd need a 3rd party boot program like system commander

[horsecharles]

edit: started this before other responses came out!

Welcome, duecekd!

don't go for avatars and smiley faces

Good for you! Neither do i-- must be a Republican / real men don't eat quiche thing.

I'm one of the least-knowledgeable members here, however-- i do multi-boot & tweak quite a bit.

Let me guess: you're not using XP's bootloader.

Simple answer: i refer you to: MSFN Member Par Excellence(pardon my French) MDGx Boot Tweaker Section Maybe this one first: http://www.angelfire.com/wizard2/hkeylocal/boot.htm or this one: http://www.penguin.cz/~mhi/mbtmgr/ though there are many good ones out there.

Since you already have both of your systems already established-- up and running... I would not recommend changing muchelse -- it can be risky: might, might cause some headaches; leave well enough alone.

There's a ton of stuff that could be done( to save space, speed up performance, have all your work & links in one place no matter what OS you work in-- won't have to look for any of it) if you were say, just about to install one of the OS. I don't like re-partitioning / re-arranging stuff when two OS have no obvious problems. Others may disagree.

Otherwise: we can have several partitions on each disk, use only one swapfile for both OS shared-- migrated to its own partition at the beginning of the least-seldom used disk, have both OS in separate partitions in one disk, data & programs in separate partitions of another disk, combine/share a slew of folders: email, data, music, documents, favorites, download, etc., etc. could even share Program Files(programs) if you wanted to... The sky's the limit-- i personally prefer using 3-4 hard disks, i then burn both OS discs to other locations & setup a regular backup/restore routine. I set up a system for one person, where if a whole hard disk-- even two, conked out, no data would be lost / he'd be up & running in no time... & wouldn't spend needless time fussing with those chores either.

I don't think it'd make sense to start moving things around; but if you're interested in that route, i have website links, guides & charts I've posted before, along with helpful apps to facilitate the changes...there are considerations, if you're sharing stuff-- like cluster size settings & so on-- it can be a project... then again, you can take it even further by adding Linux....you can have quite a bit of fun with the whole thing.

As always, other illustrious members here may have different, better, more numerous suggestions.... you won't be lacking for help in whatever you wish to accomplish with your system. All the best to you.