I have 2 hard drives installed in removable racks. My primary (master) drive is a 20gb Maxtor, formatted NTFS as a single partition and running W2Kpro. This drive is 75% full. My secondary (slave) drive is an 80gb Maxtor partitioned into 4 virtual drives formatted FAT32. The first partition contains W98se, so it is bootable if it is repositioned into the Master bay. The other partitions on this drive are for data storage. Having the W98 operating system on the slave drive is useful to me because I have some software which works well in W98 and not so well (if at all) in W2K, but I have to shut down the system and reposition this drive into the Master bay and then reboot before I can access it. I recently bought a Western Digital 160gb drive, which I have partitioned into 6 virtual drives, 5 formatted FAT32, and one (the second one) formatted NTFS. I did a clean (basic) install of W98se on the first (C) partition and a clean (basic) install of W2Kpro on the second (D) partition. This gave me dual-boot capability within this single drive and I was able to boot into either operating system at will. Now I need to duplicate the configurations of the original operating systems onto this new drive. In the past I have successfully used Norton Ghost 2003 to clone partitions to backup drives, which work flawlessly when installed into the computer in place of the original, so I tried to clone the W2K system to the second (NTFS) partition of the new drive. When I tried to boot the clone, it booted up almost all the way and then generated an error message “The system has no paging file or the paging file is too small”. I WAS able to successfully clone the W98se system from the first(C ) partition of the original slave drive to the (C ) partition of the new drive. I think the problem lies in the fact that on the original drive, the W2K system resides on “C” and I am attempting to clone it to “D” postion on the new drive. I tried to restore an image of the original system to this D partition and it booted to about the same point as the clone but hung (with no error message), leaving me looking interminably at a blue screen (a friendly blue screen, not the “Blue Screen of Death”). Is there any way I can get a clone (or an image) from the original C drive to boot up on the new D drive? The original system is chock full of software, some of which I use constantly and some only occasionally, but all of which I want to keep. To try to replicate the system piece by piece on top of a clean install of W2K would be almost impossible and terribly time consuming. Cloning, or imaging, is so slick and complete that I am trying desperately to come up with some way to make it work. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this rather lengthy post.

Yes, the problem is both operating systems see each other as residing on C: drive, and it's not an easy thing trying to convince the system to make itself another drive letter. Have you tried going into Disk Management in Win2K and changing the drive letter of the Win2K system partition to the letter C: . Since this is done in Win2K, this should not affect the Win98 system, and when Win98 boots up it should ignore whatever drive letters you gave it in Win2K and see itself as being on the C: drive. If this doesn't work, you can ghosting the original Windows 2000 system partition to the 1st partition of the 160GB drive, then ghost the original Windows 98 system partition to the 2nd partition of the 160GB drive. Then, it should work like this; Windows 2000 should boot up normally and consider itself as the C: drive. Then, when you boot up into the Windows 98 system, because your Win2K partition is formatted in NTFS, and Win98 can't read NTFS, it should pass over this partition and consider where it resides on the 2nd partition as the C: drive. You will probably have to modify the boot.ini file menu so that it can display the option to boot into either system.

Thank you for your response. Configured as it is, I can't get into W2K to make the changes you suggest to the drive letter assignment. I have in mind to try to follow your alternate suggestion, i.e. ghost my W2K installation onto C partition and then install W98 on D partition. I think I read somewhere that the boot sector of W98 must reside within the first 2gb of the disk. This might present a problem, since the first 15gb of the disk will be formatted NTFS and occupied by W2K. I discovered a site (http://thpc.info/dual/dual9xother.html) which might help but have not had the time to study it thoroughly. I will let you know how I make out.

This might be a little too late but others may need to read this. The error you are having is often the result of cloning a drive. It can also occur if a second drive is attached to the system that already has a drive C: on it. Since all flavors of Windows cannot boot with two drive C:'s, it goes ahead and conveniently reassigns one of the C: drives. This takes place in the MBR. In the cloning circumstance, the primary partition will be missing its logical drive information! This happens when you clone a drive, unhide the partitions on both drives, and then boot into Windows with the clone still attached. Fortunately, there is an easy fix. Make a DOS bootable floppy disk and copy the FDISK.exe utility. After booting the bad machine with this floppy, type: FDISK /MBR This command will wipe out the current MBR with the junk logical drive arrangements. Eject the floppy and boot normally into Windows. The MBR will be recreated with the correct logical information. FDISK /MBR works with FAT16/32/NTFS Good Luck. ~BluScarab~ HACK THE PLANET!