[WhatThe]

Hello everyone

I needed to create a dual boot 98/XP machine, from a machine which already had XP installed and working well for a long time.

There was only one partiton to start with

I have used partition magic to resize the partition and move it to allow for a small partition at the start of the drive, I did this because of the PQmagic warning about the 98SE 8GB boot limit.

After thinking about that I dont think I needed to move the XP partition because if I had left the partition where it was XP would handle the initial boot sequence?

So what I have now is a machine which boots hapily into XP or 98, but I have to use PQmagic rescue disks to make each partition active to change operating sytems.

I have modified the boot.ini (in windows xp when its partition is active) file as follows,

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\WINDOWS="98" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

I get a boot option menu, however when I choose 98 I get the following error,

Windows could not start because the follwing file is missing or corrupt <windows root>system32\hal.dll

Is hal.dll a xp only thing?

any help would make my day, thanks

Please

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Hey

Have you installed windows 98SE on the other partition ?
From what you describing, it seems that the WIN 98SE installation is
corrupt and you need to reinstall it.

Good Luck

________________
Simple John
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Edited by Keith, 12 September 2005 - 04:22 PM.

[simplejohn]

Hey

Have you installed windows 98SE on the other partition ?
From what you describing, it seems that the WIN 98SE installation is
corrupt and you need to reinstall it.

Good Luck

________________
Simple John
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Edited by Keith, 12 September 2005 - 04:22 PM.

[WhatThe]

So what I have now is a machine which boots hapily into XP or 98, but I have to use PQmagic rescue disks to make each partition active to change operating sytems.

Yeah I have 98 Installed with all dirvers and doing its job.

My only problem is that I cant seem to create a workable boot menu

[WhatThe]

No Clues?

[twstedo]

I have a win98/xp pro dual boot system but, I loaded win98 first my boot.ini file looks like this


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
C:\="Microsoft Windows"

I hope this helps

[WhatThe]

Hi all, thanks for your help

I just used Bottmagic to create the boot menu and all is good now.

Thanks again.

[Cryptie]

Just a follow-up to let you know what was going on there. When dual booting a machine you always want to install the oldest OS first. ie in this case you would have wanted to install 98 first then XP last. What happened when you did it the other way is 98 decided to attempt to write its own boot information to the drive. Hence the need to use the third-party boot loader.

[WhatThe]

I needed to create a dual boot 98/XP machine, from a machine which already had XP installed and working well for a long time.

I am aware that it is best to install the oldest OS first.

Are you saying that you can write a boot.ini file that will boot those OS's without boot magic? or are you just talking to be heard?

Please elaborate on this comment

What happened when you did it the other way is 98 decided to attempt to write its own boot information to the drive

What parts of the drive do you believe it "attempted" to write to.

I have used partition magic to resize the partition and move it to allow for a small partition at the start of the drive, I did this because of the PQmagic warning about the 98SE 8GB boot limit.

Edited by WhatThe, 02 September 2005 - 11:02 PM.

[Cryptie]

I'm terrible with quoting on this forum so please bear with me.

The boot.ini file makes little difference after 98 was installed - basically when 98 was installed it would normally rewrite the boot sector of the drive to point to its partition. Now how it remained to boot XP is curious to me. What you could probably do since you do have the rescue disk is to boot to a XP install cd, choose 'r' at the first menu. When it drops you to a command prompt type 'fixboot'. I would wager that if you force XP to write a new bootsector and have the proper info in the boot.ini file it will boot both xp and 98 with no problem.