Hi, I am trying to set up a triple-boot system with linux, windows 2000, and dos 8 from windows 98 se. I have my hard drive set up like this:

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16MB Boot linux primary1 type 83 (linux)
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16MB dos 8 primary2 type 06 (fat16)
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10GB win2k primary3 type 0c (fat32 lba) BOOTABLE
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3.2GB extended primary4 type 0f (extended lba)
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3.1GB extended hda5 type 83 (linux)
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128MB extended hda6 type 82 (linux swap)
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What I want to do is to boot either linux or win2k, and also be able to boot the dos partition so that I can play old DOS games that do not work under windows 2000. I had tons of trouble getting the two fat partitions working, because often when I booted with a win98 boot disk, fdisk would see both partitions, and say they were C: and D:, but format would not see D:, and say invalid drive letter. I finally have it working, sort of, but here is the problem:

Since the fat32 drive is bootable, dos 8 assigns it C:, and itself D:. However no matter what settings I change in msdos.sys on the dos 8 drive, it WILL NOT BOOT OFF OF D:! This is very annoying. HostWinBootDrv=D changes NOTHING, and if I set the other two windows paths to D:\, it makes no difference. On each bootup, if I pick the dos 8 partition from lilo, dos 8 loads, but then asks for command.com. I have to tell it D:\COMMAND.COM, and it works, but doesn't load autoexec.bat or config.sys. Is there any way at all to get it to load automatically off of D? I know I could start messing around with the partitions again, but it'd be much easier if I could just tell it what
drive to boot off of. From what I've read researching this, this is the boot sequence:

IO.SYS loads
MSDOS.SYS loads (How does IO.SYS know where to find it?)
COMMAND.COM (IO.SYS should know to look in HostWinBootDrv, but for some reason it doesn't. Also, I tried copying msdos.sys and io.sys to C:\, but it made no difference. So this problem doesn't have to do
with IO.SYS not finding the MSDOS.SYS and it's settings)
CONFIG.SYS (IO.SYS should look for it in HostWinBootDrv, right?)
AUTOEXEC.BAT (Ditto)

Maybe there is even some hex editing that needs to be done, but does anyone here have any idea why IO.SYS so blatantly ignores the MSDOS.SYS HostWinBootDrv setting? BTW, setting it to A works, so maybe it has some limits (only A and C maybe). Any way to get around this with hex editing the io.sys?

Thanks for any ideas (hopefully :) )

Also, before you suggest this :), Setting either both partitions to bootable, or just the dos 8 partition, or neither, makes the error go away, BUT dos 8 then thinks that the win2k partition is COMPLETELY EMPTY (9.8GB free). Like I said, I've tried alot of different combinations :)

Marcin Mirski

Try the Partition Manager program located at:

http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/

This program will allow you to create a number of primary partitions on one drive. It also can install a boot loader onto the drive so that you can boot these. When one of the primary partitions is loaded, the others are all hidden from the currently running OS. I will soon be running 16 individual operating systems off of one hard drive thanks to this little util. Plus it's freeware and it includes the source code! Good luck and ask if you have any questions seeing that I've already figured out all of the little quirks in it. (I think.)

Windows 98SE (Or 95,A,B,C,98) will only allow you to Boot from Drive C. As DoOMsdAY
says you need a Boot or Partition Manager to do what you want. No end of editing MSDOS.SYS will make any differance.

Windows 98SE uses MS-DOS 7.10 (same as 98) by the way!

I thought '95 used 7.0, OSR2 used 7.1, '98 used 8.0, and Im not sure what '98SE uses. Neh, makes no difference. :)

I got it working by copying autoexec.bat, config.sys, io.sys, msdos.sys, and command.com to drive C:, cuz win2k just ignores those. I boot the D: drive with lilo, the DOS boot loader looks for stuff on C:, and when it finds it, I guess it's happy. Then the startup files load stuff off of D:. So everything works :). BUT, why on earth would MS make DOS-based OSes ONLY be able to boot off of C:? That's a bit retarded imo.

Actually MS-DOS and 9x both are like that. They have the be the first partition on the boot drive in order to work. Hence my suggesting the partition manager. With it you can boot off of any hard drive and any partition with an MS-DOS or 9x OS. The reason for this is explained in the documentation for the partition manager on that above site I posted. Usually I install my picky OS (ie. Windows) on the primary partition of the boot drive and then use Linux (and LILO) to boot. Like that you can install one picky OS, any number of happy OS' and then Linux with LILO.

To Marcin Mirski

I wrote that Windows 98SE (Or 95,A,B,C,98) will only allow you to Boot from Drive C

I did not say Windows 2000 (NT5) or for that matter NT4 did! As they do not use MS-DOS as a Boot Loader!

And as to which version of DOS which version of Windows uses. It may not matter to you, but it may well do to others>