Dual Boot PC

[Aku]

I think there are some dual booters here. Is it a hassle to do? I have two hard drives. Can I stick Win98 on the second drive (and have that drive boot first), or do I have to do that business with Win98 and XP on the same hard drive, with Win98 in the first partition?

Why do I even want to bother? Well, Starfleet Command Gold has a bad stuttering problem in XP, Mechwarrior 3 has a couple of XP issues, and European Air War works in XP but only after you make a registry change. But it's not worth it if dual booting my machine just openes up other potential problems that could make a mess of my pc - as much as I want to ply SFC again!

[Renzatic Gear]

Divide your harddrive in half, one half for NTFS and the other for FAT32. Keep in mind that Win98 can't read off the NTFS section, and XP doesn't perform well on a FAT32 partition so you're pretty much gonna lose half your harddrive space for newer games. Also give each OS it's own swapfile...for convience and all that good stuff.

Install Win98 first, since XP's install is more user friendly and you can guide it to the 2nd partition without nearly as big of a headache. Beyond that do everything as usual and you SHOULD be prompted with a selection during the boot process from there on out.

As long as you keep the 98 drivers and programs seperate from the XP stuff you shouldn't experience any problems out of the norm.

[Aku]

Huh, when I bought the pc XP was sinstalled on FAT32. I've red pros and cons for doing it both ways. Right now my second hard drive is NTFS. The two partitions on my main drive are FAT32. I was wondering if I could make that second drive bootable, stick Win98 on it (I'd have to put a FAT32 partition on it first), and make that drive boot ahead of my XP hard drive. Then install System Commander or whatever under Win98 to bring up the OS options when booting.