J
Joe
My goal was to have a dual setup with windows 98 and xp. I
had already formatted half my hard drive to run windows 98
on fat32, it worked fine. When I ran the xp cd from dos
(it is an academic professional upgrade) i did not see
many of the advanced options specified by the manual. I
formatted the other half of my hard drive in ntfs and told
it to install there, only because it did not offer the
option of fat32. Upon restart to finish the install, my
computer said there was a disk error (not the one for
floppies.)
After fidgeting around with boot disks, i got to dos. I
realized that windows 98 would not run, but xp had not
replaced it (besides, i had asked it to install on the new
partition.) Upon attempting to reinstall xp, the program
only showed one partition of the hard drive, which was 32
gigs, far under the original size of the partitions. (come
to think of it, this might be the size of all the actual
data i had on the disk.)
All I really want to do is get the data off the disk for
now, and afterwards set up the dual boot. But since they
don't make cd-burning software for dos, and i don't feel
like buying a spare hard drive, it seems like i have to
get an operating system up and running again, without
wiping out the data.
I can think of two reasons my install failed. Back when I
formatted my hard drive the first time, I used a maxtor
overlay. When I formatted for xp, I used the xp cd,
without the overlay. Since I was installing two different
file formats on the same drive to begin with, it might
have caused a conflict. (As a side note, when I put that
cd in now, it tells me it will erase all the data if i
want to look at my partitions, so i don't want to go
there. Does that really make sense?)
The other possible reason has to do with my bios options.
Before I installed xp, I turned on "Boot to os/2" (which I
really hope means boot to where you can choose between 2
different operating systems, but upon reflection it might
not mean that.) I also have options to run in compatible
mode (win 98) or enhanced mode (win xp) for my ide
devices. Under these options you can run on sata only,
pata only, or both (i have no sata devices.) I have
already tried fooling around with the sata, pata,
compatible, and enhanced modes to see how it affects what
partitions the xp install (and the hard drive) sees, but
with no discernable differences.
I'm going to try to reinstall windows 98 now. I want to
know three things: how to get the data off the hard drive
(or how to get an os working without loosing data,) how to
get the dual boot working, and what I did wrong. Please
help!
had already formatted half my hard drive to run windows 98
on fat32, it worked fine. When I ran the xp cd from dos
(it is an academic professional upgrade) i did not see
many of the advanced options specified by the manual. I
formatted the other half of my hard drive in ntfs and told
it to install there, only because it did not offer the
option of fat32. Upon restart to finish the install, my
computer said there was a disk error (not the one for
floppies.)
After fidgeting around with boot disks, i got to dos. I
realized that windows 98 would not run, but xp had not
replaced it (besides, i had asked it to install on the new
partition.) Upon attempting to reinstall xp, the program
only showed one partition of the hard drive, which was 32
gigs, far under the original size of the partitions. (come
to think of it, this might be the size of all the actual
data i had on the disk.)
All I really want to do is get the data off the disk for
now, and afterwards set up the dual boot. But since they
don't make cd-burning software for dos, and i don't feel
like buying a spare hard drive, it seems like i have to
get an operating system up and running again, without
wiping out the data.
I can think of two reasons my install failed. Back when I
formatted my hard drive the first time, I used a maxtor
overlay. When I formatted for xp, I used the xp cd,
without the overlay. Since I was installing two different
file formats on the same drive to begin with, it might
have caused a conflict. (As a side note, when I put that
cd in now, it tells me it will erase all the data if i
want to look at my partitions, so i don't want to go
there. Does that really make sense?)
The other possible reason has to do with my bios options.
Before I installed xp, I turned on "Boot to os/2" (which I
really hope means boot to where you can choose between 2
different operating systems, but upon reflection it might
not mean that.) I also have options to run in compatible
mode (win 98) or enhanced mode (win xp) for my ide
devices. Under these options you can run on sata only,
pata only, or both (i have no sata devices.) I have
already tried fooling around with the sata, pata,
compatible, and enhanced modes to see how it affects what
partitions the xp install (and the hard drive) sees, but
with no discernable differences.
I'm going to try to reinstall windows 98 now. I want to
know three things: how to get the data off the hard drive
(or how to get an os working without loosing data,) how to
get the dual boot working, and what I did wrong. Please
help!