On drive (C:) I have Windows XP Professional installed and I have another seperate drive (F:) on which I want to install Windows 98 SE. I have read the dual booting guides, however they recommend to install Win 98 first, something I don't want to do because I have Win XP setup and its a lot of work to get it back to how I want it. If Windows 98 SE is installed after Win XP, they say it will over-write files, however will this happen if Win 98 is on an entirely seperate drive. If this I am able to dual boot with Win 98 installed after Win XP, how exactly would I go about doing a dual boot with Win XP installed then Win 98 installed? Any help would be very much appreciated... Jim.

It will cause problems no matter what drive it is on because it will over right the MBR which resides on the C:\drive The mess it creates can be un-done but it can be a pain in the ass to undo it. You can use a 3rd party boot loader like System Commander, XOS, etc. which should allow you to install XP without issues and have your dual boot setup but things can go wrong regardless. KTTD

In your current situation, if XP = fat32 (C: drive/active Primary partition = fat32) then it is possible. There are many who would advocate 'both' OS on the same physical-drive, each in its own partition/logical-drive; a common system partition (for both OS boot/start-up files); or one OS in the active Primary (and 'both' OS boot-files resident there too) and the other OS system files in a separate partition/logical-drive. A second drive would be pure data - subdivided somewhat for ease of organisation/defrags etc. You might consider that approach too, even if you do ultimately go with your projected approach? However unlike W2K it seems that XP is particularly uncooperative if you try to put '9x into the same partition as XP. With '9x/W2K it can be done - but isn't really advised (M$/gurus - although it 'usually' works OK) - and again the file format has to be fat32 (even fat16 but unlikely with W2K...). If C: drive = ntfs then it's more complicated. Post back with details of current C: (active Primary) partition format; also details of any other partitions. Also have a browse of: http://computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/21665.html (response #5). It details '9x/W2K; it translates simply to '9x/XP (just replace W2K with XP and away you go...). It will probably help you understand the various ways to go about it; and those are not all there are... http://computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/48938.html (response #4) discusses this issue to with a few other variants included. The repair routine for XP is similar but nonetheless slightly different to that of W2K. But essentially once '9x goes in (after XP in this case, similarly '98 after W2K) it disables the XP (or W2K ) mbr (it replaces/overwrites it with the '98/dos version). The repair routine allows you to restore it, and makes the other required adjustments to complete the dual-boot. XP repair routines: http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm#How%20Partition%20using%20the%20Recovery%20Console: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q307654 Also Jo Helmig covers it in his XP section(s) at: http://www.helmig.com

If you have XP installed in FAT32 then it is possible to instal 98 in another drive. go to www.dougknox.com There are instructions there for doing what you want. If your XP is in NTFS then you'll have to look at third party bootloaders.

KTTD,trvlr, Richard59 thanks for you response, and especially trvlr thanks for the information and help you provided. I installed Win XP to a FAT32 partition (I didn't see the point in NTFS when I installed it originally!) and after I posted I had another browse around on the computing.net forums. I eventually found this article : http://computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/41776.html Which lead me to as Richard59 mentioned Doug Knoxs guide. (http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_9x.htm) I setup the dual boot this evening and so far so good. :-D The instructions were good and well explained. However I would not recommend using the default Win 98 startup disk because this uses the RAMDrive and changes all your drive letters (this confused me for a while when I wondered why Win 98 wouldn't install on a CD-ROM drive!). Instead I would use the Windows 98 SE Custom, No Ramdrive startup disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm which would keep your drive letters the same (I'm guessing.) Everything else went smoothly. {To any people doing this I would also recommend they know how to change the order of which drives the machine boots from in the BIOS.) The only two minor issues I have are: 1) How to I change the drive letters in Win 98 so they are the same as in Win XP? 2) I have increased the timeout of the boot loader to 30 seconds, is there any way of setting it to an unlimited time, so it stays on screen until the user selects the OS? Anyway thank you all for your help, I should I have searched a bit harder on here first before I went posting! Jim.