2 OS on same hard drive

[John]

Really good point there!
If your Win98 is just recently installed and the HD only contains one
partition the simplest thing is to use old FDISK to repartition the disk
and reinstall Win98. With FDISK you only need to create one partition
and leave the rest of the HD unpartitioned. When in the WinXP
installation you can create new partitions and format them as you want.
I recommend to use NTFS with WinXP even if that means that you cannot
read the NTFS partition when running Win98 (or is there some program
that allows reading an NTFS partition from Win98?)

Dont use fdisk after you've installed BM and PM. If you do, you'll stuff the
partition table

 

[John]

Why *install* PM in the first place? Even if you do want to use PM to
repartition, resize, clone, convert etc there's no need to install it to
Windows.

Just make the PM dos boot floppy (or make a dos boot cd), boot from that
and you have access to all its capabilities. The only thing installing
it to Windows does is to give you a dumbed-down interface to set up any
changes you want. It then reboots into dos mode to do the actual changes
anyway. So why bother and take this risk of upsetting windows - as you
found?

I have used Pm 4 thru' 8 and never installed any version.

I do agree with you though that the only reason PM (or similar) might be
needed in this case is if it's necessary to re-size the existing Win98
partition to create room for XP. (It might, theoretically, be possible
to install XP in the same partition but I wouldn't want to risk it).

Once the free space is made available the rest of the install is a no
brainer and XP will set up the boot manager. Notwithstanding this, many
people elect to use a third part boot manager (such as Boot Magic)
anyway since it lets you fully isolate (hide) the two operating system
partitions from each other (which the XP boot manager won't).

Incidentally, BootitNG (Bing) has a better reputation than PM with many
people for both partition management and boot management.

PM 8 allows you to browse/copy files to/from hidden partitions. The DOS
version does
not have this capability

 

[none]

Thanks for the response. I'm going to check my system for the Gear
driver. Where did you find it, in the services? I actually have had
an issue with spin up and seek times on my two CD/DVD drives as well
and never had a clue why. Maybe its PM. Did you just uninstall PM
and the Gear driver went away? I might do this for the hell of it
anyway. I don't use PM anymore anyways.

 

[Mercury]

HKLM.....Services
It was not a visible device.
It was visible in the driver chain for the dvd.

 

[John]

I bought Norton Partition Magic so I could put WIN98 and WINXP on the
same drive. My problem is that : I installed WIN98 first with no
problem but I cannot figure out how to install WINXP so that I can
duel boot. Any help would be appreciated
Bob

I suggest a third OS be installed too.

Make a small 100MB partition at the start of the disk. Install DOS on it,
and the DOS floppies for PM and Norton Ghost. Very handy for maintenance /
backup (no need for floppies etc, fast bootup)