Greetings --
The simplest way I've found to multi-boot between Win9x/Me, Win2K
& WinXP would be to partition your drive roughly as follows:
Primary Partition:
C: FAT32 Win9x
Extended Partition:
1st Logical Drive D: NTFS Win2K
2nd Logical Drive E: NTFS WinXP
Adjust the partition sizes according to your actual hard drive(s)
size and the amount of space you'd like to allocate to each OS and its
applications.
Create the partitions using Win9x's FDISK so you can enable large
disk support (FAT32). (No need for 3rd party partitioning
utilities/boot managers and their frequent complications.) You need
only format the Win9x partition at this time, the Win2K/XP
installations can format their own respective partitions as part of
their setup routines.
Install Win9x first, being sure to select "C:\Windows" when asked
for the default Windows directory. When you subsequently install
Win2K/XP, be sure to specify "D:\Winnt" and E:\Windows," as
preferred/applicable) when asked for the default Windows directory, to
place them on the other partitions. The Win2K/XP installation routines
will automatically set up the Multi-boot menu for you. The default
settings for this menu can be readily edited from within Win2K/XP.
This method can be adapted to using 2 physical hard drives by
placing the boot partition (C:, which still must be FAT32) and either
of the operating systems on the Primary Master hard drive, and the
second and/or third operating system(s) on the second hard drive. Just
remember to keep each OS in its own partition.
It is also possible to have a 4th partition for shared
applications, but it would be necessary for such a partition to be
formatted in the common file format (FAT32). The applications would
also have to be installed into each OS (to ensure proper system file
placement and registry updates), one at a time, but the bulk of the
program files could be located on this common partition. I do not,
however, actually recommend doing this as, if you were to uninstall
such an application from one OS, you may not be able to gracefully
uninstall it from the second/third OS, having already deleted crucial
installation data during the first uninstall action.
Just about everything you need to know (URLs may wrap):
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/administration/management/mltiboot.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gettingstarted/multiboot.asp
Bruce Chambers
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