Dual Boot woes

[Mike]

Hi folks-

I've got a problem. I had Win98 and Win2k together on seperate
partitions on the same drive and both were working. Boot manager was
working, etc. I can't remember the chain of events, but I ended up
running fdisk /mbr and lost Win2k. Win98 booted only after that. Then,
I reinstalled Win2k. But, I never got back Win98 in the boot menu.

I'e tried adding Win98 to the boot.ini and get the error about
ntoskrnl.exe being missing or corrupt. Well, I don't think it needs to
be on the Win98 partition, does it?

My partition layout is as follows:

Primary - win98
first logical in extended - win2k
second logical - win2k swap
rest of the logicals are for linux, but linux is not installed yet.

i'm worried that linux boot loaders won't pickup on win2k AND win98 if
I don't fix this problem first?

 

[Bill Blanton]

"Mike" <fatbucket@gmail.com> wrote in message news:1191676277.731040.17260@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com...
> Hi folks-
>
> I've got a problem. I had Win98 and Win2k together on seperate
> partitions on the same drive and both were working. Boot manager was
> working, etc. I can't remember the chain of events, but I ended up
> running fdisk /mbr and lost Win2k. Win98 booted only after that. Then,
> I reinstalled Win2k. But, I never got back Win98 in the boot menu.

Did you happen to run a "Sys C:" also? Fdisk/mbr shouldn't have been a
problem. If you did do a Sys, then that would have blown away the 98
boot sector that W2k installed in order to dual boot.

>
> I'e tried adding Win98 to the boot.ini and get the error about
> ntoskrnl.exe being missing or corrupt. Well, I don't think it needs to
> be on the Win98 partition, does it?

You mean adding W2K to boot.ini? When you boot, do you get the
boot menu with the choice of OSs? What's currently contained in boot.ini?


>
> My partition layout is as follows:
>
> Primary - win98
> first logical in extended - win2k
> second logical - win2k swap
> rest of the logicals are for linux, but linux is not installed yet.
>
> i'm worried that linux boot loaders won't pickup on win2k AND win98 if
> I don't fix this problem first?

Not necessarily. If you're going to be multi booting with Linux, the Linux
boot loader(grub?) may be all you need. Another option would be to install a
third party boot manager such as BootitNG. Personally, I'd steer clear of
using (fixing) Microsoft's boot manager. It creates too many obstacles to change.