I have two drives. They are partitioned as follows: Disk 0 = FAT32 (C: 4.01 GB) WinXP installed Disk 1 = FAT32 (F: 1.95 GB) FAT32 (G: 5.91 GB) Win98 SE installed on F: [ I have two cdrom drives --> D: & E: ] If I unplug Disk 0's power source, Win98 boots up fine. If I unplug Disk 1's power source, WinXP boots up fine. If I leave both connected it boots to WinXP. My boot.ini has an option for Win98 but it says missing hal.dll...when I put it in the system32 folder it said bad or corrupt version of it..most likely because it's for WinXP not Win98. Here's my boot.ini: [boot loader] timeout=7 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 98" /fastdetect I tried to change the last line for the win98 to: C:\ = "Microsoft Windows 98" , but it did not work. neither did D:\ or E:\ in the front there...anyone have any ideas as to what the problem might be? I just want to make this have a way to choose between the two OS's...dual-boot. I got it to work fine on my other computer, but everything was on one hard disk... I appreciate any help...thanks.

I think you should have your Windows 98 on the 1st partition on your primary hard drive. Windows 9x systems must all be installed there. AS for Windows 2000 and XP thay can be installed on any partition or drive, primary or logical. If you are not useing a boot program (like boot magic) you might have to format and re-install in this order Win98 then WinXP and you should be able to use the built in XP startup screen. Good Luck

www.dougknox.com look for installing an OS after XP is already installed

I had the same problem. You're on the right track but you got off at the wrong station. You said that 98SE is on F:. Change that line to read F:\="Microsoft Windows 98" and it should work fine. Originally it was looking in the \windows directory but those files are not there as you found out. They are in the root directory and in your case it is F: I'll assume you installed 98 before XP. If not go to dougknox.com. He has instructions for that fix. Also Colin might be correct IIRC that 98 should be on the first partition. But give it a try. It sounds like it wanted to go but just couldn't find the files.