W98 w/XP Home 3

[itsgenekramer]

I have a PC with a partitioned drive. I have XP Home on the C drive and W98 on the D drive. Ordinarily, when I start up, I am prompted with which OS I want to boot to. I recently reformatted and reinstalled both OS's, but now the PC boots to W98 w/o giving me the option to choose. I fdsik'd, formatted (not quick) and reloaded both OS's again(XP first, but with a partitioned drive it shouldn't matter) and it still boots to W98. I checked the boot.ini file and both options are in there. Any ideas will be welcomed?

Gene Kramer

 

[bcastner]

XP second, not first. The reason it matters is that both OS will right to the boot partition with boot information.

 

[wolluf]

As bcastners says - both use boot sector on C: drive - and only XP has dual boot capability - so if you install 98 last it just overwrites the boot sector with its own - so no dual boot.

If you intend continuing dual booting, and you want to avoid this happening if you need to reinstall 98, it might be worth considering putting each on a primary partition, with own boot sector on the partition and using a third part boot manager (I use

http://www.boot-us.com

- free for personal use). If you set up one o/s then hide its partition while setting up the second, you should get desired result (boot-us has hiding tools).

Or use doug knox's fix for your situation -

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_9x.htm

 

[itsgenekramer]

I tried Doug Knox's and it works. I now have the boot choice prompt but when I choose W98 it just restarts the counter and doesn't boot to 98. I can boot to XP fine. Thanks for your help.