Thanks for the suggestions, Bill.  I've received another piece of advice that says, because either OS appears as the C drive when it's active, that means that the inactive partition is hidden, and therefore I can't use the NT loader.  Does that make sense to you?

Thanks,

Charlie

That may very well be the case.  If you installed XP after your other version of Windows, check the boot.ini file in the XP partition to see if it contains a line recognizing the other version.  If the other version was installed after XP (and that is the only reason I could see for hiding the partitions from each other), then checking the boot.ini file won't help.  Since one of the partitions must be hidden, to boot to that partition the loader must be able to hide the prior partition and activate the one being booted to.  I have no idea whether NT loader can do that.

You might check one thing with Symantec: could you install Go Back on both partitions, so that each version would work only for the one partition?  I suspect that the answer will be NO, because they do not really know whether it would work (not having tested it that way).

One afterthought, I just re-read your original post.  You do not say there that the XP partition is a primary partition; XP installs quite satisfactorily on a logical partition.  If XP is on a logical partition, then it should recognize your 98 partition and be able to access it.  The reverse would not be true since 98 cannot read NTFS; it would list it as some sort of unknown thing.  But you also say in a later post that both partitions regard themselves as C:, in which case they both must be primary and hidden from one another.  Did you use Partition Magic to set the thing up?  In which case you might check with their tech support whether you could unhide the XP partition and change it to a logical one; the problem there is that it would mess up Registry entries because of the change in disk letters, although you could tell PM to call the changed partition E: (or whatever letter would mess up things least) and PM contains Drive Mapper which can solve many such problems.  BUT, after all of that, I suspect that you are better off using some other method of being able to go back.  My solution has been to use an external Firewire hard drive, to which I back up everything on my system and programs drives once a week or before any major software install using Drive Image 7.0 (takes less than half an hour).

Message Edited by Bill Snyder on 04-04-2004 11:57 AM

Thanks for the great response, Bill.  I'm understanding this better.  I did use Partition Magic to set up the system.  98 was installed first, then PM, which was used to create a second primary partition (NTFS).  Using PM, NTFS was set active, first (98) partition hidden, and then boot from XP CD and install.  After that was up and running, installed PM under XP, hid that partition, made the 98 partition active, booted to 98, installed BootMagic, and here I am.

The problem with Partition Magic tech support is that it is now Symantec, which has no free sort of "live" tech support, even e-mail. 

I actually do use a backup system nearly identical to yours.  In addition to regular tape backup, I have an external USB2 drive that I use Drive Image 7 to create disk image backups to.  For full system restores, that has saved me hours on at least one recent occasion.  The main reason I use GoBack is that it provides a very convenient and fast way to recover from software installations gone bad.  You know, everything worked great before I installed Product X, then nothing worked.  Fire up GoBack, tell it to revert the drive to just before the bad installation, and presto, back to where I was.  This has saved me countless hours on numerous occasions.

But obviously, something is going to have to give.  Thanks for your help.  That'll move me along faster.

Charlie