Dual booting with 2 hard drives?

[macko]

I want to set up puter to dual boot win2k and win98. Everything I read is for 1 hard drive. They talk about partions, etc. I want to use 2 drives, one for 98 and the other for 2k. Can someone steer me in the right direction? Thanks, mack.

[Beemer]

Hi Macko. If you have 2 drives, why don't you put the O/S's on one drive and your files on the other? You will get more performance this way. Do you have any special needs to have the O/S's split to the 2 drives? If not, what sizes are the drives?

Cheers!

[macko]

Hi Beemer. I am going to have a total of 4 hard drives. My board has and ide 3 and ide 4. I want to have win98 on one drive with the second drive for its files and win2k on its own drive with a fourth drive for its files. The reason I don't want to keep them on the same drive is in case one of the drives every fail. At least I'll be up and running on the other drive.

[KenKun]

Well macko, dual booting from 2 drives is easier as you can skip the partition mess ...
You should load win98 on c: drive, after finishing the setup process ... you should install win2k on the other drive by doing on of the following:
*boot from win2k CD and a wizard should guide you from there
*or while in win98 put win2k CD in the drive .. it will as you if you want to upgrade, choose clean install .. after rebooting choose the second drive as the destination ..

You will have a boot menu so you can choose which OS to access ..

It is really easy .. so have fun

Regards

[maface]

I would install 98 on your "C" drive then install Win2000 on "D"

When installing Win2000 to any other partition (logical or primary) on any drive, a small portion must still be installed in a bootable FAT or FAT32 primary partition on the first drive(C)

I would back up your boot files onto a disk (boot.bak, boot.ini, ntdetect.com,ntlr) in case your "C" drive gets corrupt

www.osfiles.com has some info on dual booting installs

Another option would be to buy something like the Romtec Trios
and you can seperate each drive.

Didn't see KenKun response, I'm being redundant

[macko]

KenKun, your way seems very easy. Maface, you said basically the same thing but confused me on "installing a small portion on the first drive". If I load the win2k disk and choose the D drive, how will I be able to load some of these files to C during the installation? Could you please explain this a little more. Thanks.

[kendo]

he is talking about the master boot record and boot ini files etc

they will load themselves properly during the installation and will require no extra steps from you

[KenKun]

As kendo said ... win2k will setup the boot menu for you automatically during the installation, so you don't have to worry about it ...

[rcwabbits]

Im anxious to see how this works. Has anyone actually done it?

I've tried it before and every few days I would get an error on boot....something about ntldr being missing or corrupt.

I finally gave up and just put them both on the same drive.

Good luck and keep us posted!

[BobViper]

ALOHA
I'm a Big removable HD fan.My current system has internal HD w\w2kpro installed.I only have 1 removable bay now(need more).
A modern MB is also important~My Abit Kt7raid.I set Bios HD to auto detect and Bios boot choices to CD-disc1-disc0.

This way my sys will boot off Cd if I need or bypass to the removable HD Boot first(XP Pro) if there is a boot sector on the HD in the bay.
If the bay contains only a storage HD~No Boot sector it proceeds to my internal HD and boots w2k(My personal Fav).

When I want to use my internal HD and still read the files on my removableHD with a boot sector I simply adjust the bios to boot disc0 first.

Also removable HD trays(good ones)have at least 1 fan that lowers HD temp a lot.

Hot swap is available but I sadly don't have the software Yet.

*I do however setup new HD OSes by themselves no other drives running as sometimes something automated may install on the wrong drive*

ALOHA