It is my understanding that PC's are not designed to work with two active
primary system partitions visible at the same time. What you are trying to
do requires this. You can do what you are attempting after a fashion, but
you run the risk of hard drive corruption and data lose. I believe you would
be able to make it work if you first set up Windows XP with the Windows 98
drive removed from the system. Then after you have finished setting up
Windows XP plug the other drive in. I suggest you make Windows XP the first
drive or it might not boot after you add the other drive. The dive number
and partition would change requiring you to edit the boot.ini file in the
root of the XP drive if it is not the first drive. I believe that Windows XP
will run in this configuration without causing data corruption, but Windows
98 will not. so if you use the NTFS file system for your system partition on
the XP drive you might be able to make it work. Note that everything I am
telling you here I learned from the PowerQuest Partition Magic manual. I was
just going to enter the url for that company for a bit of advertising of a
good product, but I see sadly that they have been consumed by a giant,
namely Symantec. so much for Partition Magic. Well, maybe Symantec won't
completely destroy it.
I strongly suggest you review your reasons for wishing to be able to
configure your system in this way. Dual boot works just great. I suspect
that you don't want to have to always have the two drives installed together
in the future. You can get around this problem using disk imaging software.
When you install Windows XP install it on an extended partition in the
second drive. It will of course use the system partition in the first drive
to boot (boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com located here). Then latter when
you want to separate the two drives and boot the second drive into Windows
XP just copy the system partition on the first drive over to the second
drive creating a primary partition at the beginning of the drive. You can
get rid of the dual boot into Windows 98 by deleting the files mentioned
above, and then boot with Windows 98 recovery disk and use the sys command.
Another other method you might consider is using a boot manager like
PowerQuest Boot Magic that comes with Partition Magic. Well, I hope this
gets you on the right track.
Cheers
