Dual Boot Help..W98SE and W2K

I hate to see a good question go unanswered so I'm gonna give it a shot. Remember to backup your important data before doing modifications like this. Also, a big issue here is to make sure that you've downloaded any new drivers that your hardware will require to operate under the new operating system before you begin.

      Let me start by saying that I have a dual-boot setup (Win98SE and W2Kpro) on my 4100, but it's on a single hard drive. I really don't think it would be very difficult to do it on two seperate drives. To me, it's basically a matter of installing the newest, larger hard drive, then configuring it as a "slave" and loading the new operating system onto it (you'll have to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the cd-rom is the first boot device during the new operating system install). W2K should detect your existing Win98 OS and create a boot menu. W2K should offer you a choice where to install it and partition/format the new hard drive if you haven't used FDISK. You must format the partition using the FAT 32 file system (instead of NTFS) so that Win98 will have access to any files on W2K.

If you would like to read more about creating a dual-boot system, look here:

http://www.techspot.com/articles/dualboot/index.shtml

If you need information about partitioning/FDISK, look here:

http://fdisk.radified.com/

http://partition.radified.com/

After you become familiar with W2K, go here to tweak the service configuration for faster operation:

http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm

Take your time, plan your moves, and you'll have a successful instalation.

Message Edited by SloMoShun on 12-31-2003 06:51 PM

SloMoShun:

I appreciate your words of advice and will heed them accordingly.  My only additional question deals with formatting the new drive...FAT 32 versus NTFS.  If I don't care whether W98 can look at W2K files, will it matter.  Are there some other tradeoffs that I should consider.  I originally planned on formatting with NFTS because I thought that was a more efficient file system and desired for W2K.   I intend on migrantly eventually away from the W98 side completely over time.  Any thoughts?  Thanks and Happy New Year.

You are correct in your thinking about NTFS. These advantages include performance (disc intensive tasks complete in 1/5 of the time, compared to FAT32), security (both for local users and over a network), recoverabilty from file system errors, auto-compression, and auto-encryption. Staying with FAT32, for me, was a matter of file compatibility across the two operating systems. Win 98 is my backup OS in case of a W2K failure (only happened once due to a virus) and a necessity since many of my "old skool" applications won't run under NT. It's also nice for accessing or creating data contained in the different hard drive partitions (since I use only one large hard drive) depending on which OS I happen to be using at the time. One final thought...I would consider using that new 80 Gig as the master drive (with dual boot c apabilities until I became comfortable with W2K) and allow the 20 Gig to act as a slave for data backups. In any event, seriously consider partitioning that new drive to reduce data fragmentation and to isolate the operating system(s) files.