Hi Firstly, apologies for posting about this topic again - as I have seen that similar posts have been answered a number of times before! I have Win XP on the C: drive and have a second hard drive with win '98 already installed. I also have a CD writer (D:) and normal CD drive(E:) So, when the system boots into XP (which it does fine incidentally) I can see and access the second hard drive (F:) like a second storage disk. What I would like to know is how -leaving my system in it's present state and without having to re-install win'98 and partition drives and things - cna I get the dual boot option at the system startup? Any clear answers or proven methods would be greatly appreciated as I am scared of fiddling with files and goofing the whole system so that it won't boot at all! Thanks in advance! Russell

questio for you: the drive win98 is on... was it at one time drive c:? That's important because if you want to dual boot, and then boot to the win98 drive, the registry and a lot of other files are most likely pointing to the c drive instead of the d drive. That would give you a lot of headaches, and you would be better off just wiping the drive, and reinstalling all of your programs.

Erm....yes it was. Well, it's like this: I disconnected the present C: drive with XP on it, restarted the system with a win98 boot disc and installed win'98. Then I reconnected the other drive back in and restarted the system, which then defaulted to being drive c: whilst the drive with win'98 became drive F: Does that make sense?

for a dual boot win98 installed on drive c: win xp on drive d: both fat 32 its the only way. win xp will set the dual boot option during its install kj computer corrrections cookson ok

I have the same setup, only I have two partitions on the same drive with each OS per partition. Boot Magic from PartitionMagic and System Commander both suggest that for a dual system, you should be on one hard drive partitioned for each OS. I installed Win98 SE on the first partition, then installed System Commander and it did the rest for installing Windows XP Home Edition. It even provided a partition for Windows 98 for a swap file. They do not recommend using two separate hard drives for dual boot.

Actually, there is another way, but you would need a 3rd party program... system commander. Slick program, you can tell it to hide the other drives, etc. You can check it out and see if that's what will work the best for you.

from the sounds of it, you should be able to get the dual boot option. Try this to see what happens: Right Click "My Computer" > Properties. Then go to the Advanced Tab. Then click the Settings button under Startup and Recovery. It should pop the startup and recovery options. At the top you can edit the default OS, click the Edit button. It will open up the boot.ini file, in here, you can try to add a link to your windows 98 OS on the other partition (i assume your hardware is the exact same as when you had windows98 on it. Just add this line under the [operating systems] : F:\ = "Microsoft Windows" be sure not to delete the xp one! also make sure your timeout=30, 30 being the time in seconds you get to choose which os to boot. hopefully that will work.. by the way, i used to triple boot.. Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP. Pretty easy to do, just need three seperate partitions (i have a nice ole 100GB HD, can never have too much space)