Anyone with dual boot and more than one disk please help me!

[Peter Hucker]

If you have an operating system installed on any disk other than the
first one, please send me your boot.ini from c:\ so I can work out how
to make mine work:

I have 4 hard ide hard disks, with windows 2000 on the primary master,
and windows 98 on the secondary slave. I currently dual boot by
choosing which to boot from in the bios. This is a bit clumsy and I
wish to add windows 98 to the windows 2000 boot menu. Trouble is, the
windows 2000 help file tells me I should have installed windows 98
first, then windows 2000, and the boot menu would have been set up
automatically. I looked at the boot.ini file, and can't make sense of
the "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)" thing. What would I use for
windows 98 on the secondary slave? I woiuld imaging disk would be set
to 3, but what is multi and rdisk? And is partition the partition
number altogether, or just counting the ones on the secondary slave
disk?

**********************************************************

Mod collection at http://listen.to/petes.mods
Tasteful naked women at http://womenare.allhere.com
Pictures at http://redirect.to/pictures
Midi collection at http://listen.to/petes.midi
Funny sound clips at http://listen.to/petes.sounds

In a new MS WORD doc, type "zzzz" (No quotes) and do a
spell check - hmmm...

[Wright, Ken MCSE]

Well, Windows told you that you erred in not installing WIN98 first. Why do
you think it meant anything other than what it said? That's a fundamental
requirement for dual-booting NT and something else. There are many
Microsoft Knowledge Base articles about the boot line in Boot.ini. Perhaps
if you look at those, you'll gain a better understanding of the boot file.

Regards,

Ken

"Peter Hucker" <huc...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:386a870...@news.btinternet.com...

[ikr]

My boot.ini is:

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=C:\
[operating systems]
C:\="MS Windows 98" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINNT="MS Windows 2000 Professional"
/fastdetect

I have Win98 installed on the root of the sole partition of my primary
master (i.e. c: drive). My secondary master drive is partitioned into 3
partitions - d:, e: and f: - and Win2k is installed on the f: - hence the
reference to partition 3 in the last line of the boot.ini file. You can also
see that the system defaults to booting Win98 after 10 seconds of no choice
being made.

Hope this helps.

[Lorin]

Here's some info:

The scoop is that you not only need the BOOT.INI to have the correct
entries, but also the BOOTSECT.BIN file specific to your disk needs to be
correct. To make it work, you'll need to have the partition you're starting
from (called the system partition) be FAT or FAT32, since that's the file
system understood by both Win2K and 98.

If you have set up Win2K with NTFS, you won't be able to dual-boot without
reinstalling at least Win2K. The easiest solution would be to set up the
drives in the BIOS so that it boots to 98, and then once booted there
install Win2K. The reason you would have to reinstall rather than create a
BOOT.INI is that since Win2K is now on a different disk than what it
expects, it won't understand how to act. All the pathing will be different
than is specified in the registry.

Another option that would work if you have the Win2K partition set up with
FAT or FAT32 is this: Get into Win2K and run RDISK to make a recovery disk
for your configuration (more for safety's sake than anything else), exit
that flavor of Windows and without changing the boot sequence in the BIOS
run the 98 setup to get its pathing straight (it can't be moved between
partitions without losing its mind, so a reinstall is certainly in order
there.) After 98 is working just fine, test and see if the boot menu comes
up as well. If it doesn't, simply run the first part of Win2K setup again,
but choose the R option during text-mode setup to recover the boot
information. Use the recovery disk and select to only restore the boot
information. It will re-build the BOOT.INI and BOOTSECT.BIN files for you,
making it dual-boot in the process. This is the same procedure you'd have
to do for NT4, and is covered in the NT4 Server exam. Note that 98 does
attempt to accomodate for existing BOOT.INI files and add entries specific
to its operation in the process of setup, so running Win2K's setup with the
recovery option should not be necessary. 95 does not understand NT's
BOOT.INI and NTLDR though, so with that OS you will need to run through the
recovery process to make it dual-boot after the fact.

BTW, in the multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) line, here's what each
means:

multi - The adapter number. Primary channel stuff is 0, and Secondary is 1.
Entry is instead called scsi for SCSI-based adapters.
disk - Used by SCSI to specify the disk number (counted incrementally as to
how the disks are laid out on the SCSI IDs), ignored by all other types of
controllers and drives, which instead use the rdisk entry.
rdisk - The disk number on the adapter. For IDE 0 is Master, 1 is Slave.
partition - The partition number, starting with 1, on the disk. Can range
from 1 to 4, but no higher since the partition table as understood by NTLDR
only has four entries. I haven't messed around alot with dynamic disks in
Win2K, so the story might have changed in that respect, I'm not sure.

FYI, this multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) info is called ARC pathing,
and is also covered in the NT4 Server exam.

-Lorin

Wright, Ken MCSE <wrig...@jps.net> wrote in message
news:3866...@news1.jps.net...

> Well, Windows told you that you erred in not installing WIN98 first. Why
do
> you think it meant anything other than what it said? That's a fundamental
> requirement for dual-booting NT and something else. There are many
> Microsoft Knowledge Base articles about the boot line in Boot.ini.
Perhaps
> if you look at those, you'll gain a better understanding of the boot file.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ken
>

[Alex Ivanoff]

As far as I know You can only run Win95/98/DOS from primary partition no
matter what You are going to do with boot.ini file. I had sort of the same
problem and ended up with installing Win95 on primary (active) partition.

[Gerwin Philippo]

I installed win2K on a primary NTFS partition, then made a fat32 partition,
made it active and installed win95 on it. Then I made the NTFS partition
active again and installed a vamos bootmanager on the mbr. It can start an
os from a non-active partition..No problems.
"Alex Ivanoff" <aiva...@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:bP0v4.10179$dU3....@typhoon.southeast.rr.com...