I was wondering what is the easiest way to dual boot Beos , win ME , and Windows 2000 Professional. I have tried installing all 3 OS's on the same physical hard drive (seperate partitions) or installing be and winME on one hard drive and win 2k on another separate drive. In both cases i can never get win2k to boot. the Be boot manager loads and i can boot either Beos or Winme just fine but when i choose Windows 2000 i just get a black screen that says "Loading Windows 2000" and nothing ever happens. Right now the Win2k drive is a slave but i can only boot off it by going into my bios and selecting d: in the boot sequence. I have even tried installing winME and Win2K and adding Beos to the win2k boot menu which didnt work either. I have also tried just windows 2000 and beos dual booting, without ME but i still cannot load win2k. Is there any other boot managers that would work better or am i just going to have to make a beos boot disk floppy to boot be?

I am working on a solution.. and believe I have it worked out.. I'll keep you posted on it.. but I believe that if you make a boot disk for BeOS and copy the files over onto a smaller (2MB) DOS partition then add that partition to the boot.ini file in win2k it will work.. more posted later. if you make it work I'd like to look at how you did it..

CML

I was just over at a frinds place who was dual booting be R5 and winME with the be boot loader. we booted off of the win2k boot disk (which i made bootable} and chose the fat32 ME partition, reformatted it to ntfs and installed win2k, leaving the be boot loader intact. Doing it this way somehow it allowed us to dual boot into either win2k or beos with no problems. So rather than installing Beos last try installing it first with the bootloader. I have no idea how this would work as I thought win2k would rewrite the mbr but somehow in this cast it left the bebootldr in. Pretty strange.

Easy, there are a few ways to do this but all rely on one simple fact, installation order. FIRST install win2k on a partition of it's own dosn't matter if it's logical or another drive. SECOND install ME on a logical or another drive. FINALY install BE OS on it's own partition this will allow BE to install it's boot manager within the correct area's and bammo you have a triple boot system. no fighing, no trobles

I had the exact same problem with the Beos bootman not being able to boot win2k. I hav e Beos 5 pro on scsi drives and never end up re-installing it, but I re-install Windows more often. I ended up using bootmagic by power qwest (Partition Magic 6) This worked excellent! No matter what order you install in. And you can set a password for each partition you make bootable. I tried to do it a little cleaner by modifying the boot.ini (while bootman was installed) I couldn't get this to work.