In BIOS you can manually disable the master drive of the primary IDE channel if you want to boot from the slave drive. If you install WinXP on an NTFS formatted drive you won't be able to access it from Win98/DOS anyway, so you're not even missing out when installing WinXP on the master drive.
I can see how this is suboptimal but at least it should solve the problem of dual booting.

I agree that using the BIOS to select the boot drive is probably the best option here.

When you installed XP, did the installer say it was installing to drive C, or to drive D?

Oh God, there no other way that enter every time in bios and select the drive to boot?

This is so strange, lot of boot manager programs can do it I read, I think my Bootmgr from BTTR software can't swap disks in the same IDE channel perhaps?

When I set master the Windows 98SE disk always boot in Windows98SE even if I select WindowsXP from the menu, and when I put the Windows XP hard disk as master it always go in Windows XP even if I select Windows 98SE disk.

This is cause the BIOS override settings about this boot manager?

Anyone have an idea?

Jorpho wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:02:

I agree that using the BIOS to select the boot drive is probably the best option here.

When you installed XP, did the installer say it was installing to drive C, or to drive D?

Oh I don't remember.

AS I said before, I installed Windows 98SE with the other hard disk disconnected (and no formatted at that moment), and when I installed WIndows XP the other hard disk was disconnected too.

Then before running the boot manager I attach all hard disks and then configured the boot manager (the correctly see two hard disk).

I cannot really think what is happening here.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:47:

AS I said before, I installed Windows 98SE with the other hard disk disconnected (and no formatted at that moment), and when I installed WIndows XP the other hard disk was disconnected too.

That's probably not going to work. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but drive letters are assigned differently depending on how many drives are connected. If you really want to use a boot manager instead of using the BIOS, then you should have both drives connected when you are doing the installations.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:45:

Oh God, there no other way that enter every time in bios and select the drive to boot?

Not every time - just when you want to switch from one drive to the other. In that regard it's substantially more convenient than using a boot manager - especially since you're probably going to wind up using one OS much more than the other. Plus you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting your boot manager and making your hard drive unbootable.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:59:

That's probably not going to work. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but drive letters are assigned differently depending on h […]
Show full quote

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:47:

AS I said before, I installed Windows 98SE with the other hard disk disconnected (and no formatted at that moment), and when I installed WIndows XP the other hard disk was disconnected too.

That's probably not going to work. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but drive letters are assigned differently depending on how many drives are connected. If you really want to use a boot manager instead of using the BIOS, then you should have both drives connected when you are doing the installations.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 22:45:

Oh God, there no other way that enter every time in bios and select the drive to boot?

Not every time - just when you want to switch from one drive to the other. In that regard it's substantially more convenient than using a boot manager - especially since you're probably going to wind up using one OS much more than the other. Plus you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting your boot manager and making your hard drive unbootable.

Ahhh ok, I understood.

With the drives disconnected when you install an operative system, it will assign every time the C:\ letter (even if I cannot see this and change) and so when I try to use the boot manager it see both of the drives with logical c:\ letter. I understood.

So now I will try to reinstall Windows XP (in the slave disk) and we'll see. I want to do this proof now, and If it doesn't work I will switch disk by changing from bios, or trying another boot manager.

Thanks a lot.

You know that XP (or any of the NT family) has a built in boot manager right?
It's not as flexible as 3rd party ones but its straight forward to use.
You have to Install Win98 on C:\
Then install XP on D:\ it'll see the Win98 install and create the menu for you.

It's another solution but I imagine Jorpho is right that having the HDD disconnected is probably the issue

chinny22 wrote on 2020-10-14, 08:49:

You know that XP (or any of the NT family) has a built in boot manager right? It's not as flexible as 3rd party ones but its str […]
Show full quote

You know that XP (or any of the NT family) has a built in boot manager right?
It's not as flexible as 3rd party ones but its straight forward to use.
You have to Install Win98 on C:\
Then install XP on D:\ it'll see the Win98 install and create the menu for you.

It's another solution but I imagine Jorpho is right that having the HDD disconnected is probably the issue

And this is exactly what happened here.
I uninstalled windows xp then reinstalled. The installation seen the disk as D: and I was thinking this was the key.
After installation i rebooted the system from floppy, where the bootmgr program is. I made all operations but another time doesn't work properly.
When I select to boot in windows 98 (then c:) this boot menu appeared for the first time. It ask to me which operating system do I want to boot. Before is written windows xp then windows 98.

So I rebooted and tried to boot directly from windows xp choice (d:) and on my monitor i see this:
HIT A KEYS TO REBOOT.

I really don't know why it doesn't start directly from windows xp with the boot mgr setting up.

When I reboot the only way to make the menu appear to choose the operating system where boot from is to select on boot mgr Windows 98 option (c:), or If I want to boot from the floppy that works too.

Another time boot mgr can't swap hard disk and make windows xp start.

I Remember i figured out some year ago, with a system with one hard disk with windows xp, another one with DOS 6.22.

I really don't know what's the problem now with this bootmgr program.

Anyway, at least I have a menu now. I will use that one, but I didn't really resolved my question unfortunately.

I use "masterbooter" boot manager: https://github.com/nagydjol/masterbooter and it can boot anything from any hard drive. It can even hide partitions on the fly if that's needed. Not the most intuitive interface, but very well documented, and it even has that DOS look and feel.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:01:

And this is exactly what happened here. I uninstalled windows xp then reinstalled. The installation seen the disk as D: and I w […]
Show full quote

And this is exactly what happened here.
I uninstalled windows xp then reinstalled. The installation seen the disk as D: and I was thinking this was the key.
After installation i rebooted the system from floppy, where the bootmgr program is. I made all operations but another time doesn't work properly.
When I select to boot in windows 98 (then c:) this boot menu appeared for the first time. It ask to me which operating system do I want to boot. Before is written windows xp then windows 98.

It sounds like your bootmgr program is fighting with the XP bootloader.

There are probably easier ways, but if you install XP to the Master drive without installing its boot menu and then install bootmgr, that will probably work. The only catch is that if Windows 98 is on the Slave drive, then it will be drive D when you are booting from XP and drive C when you are booting from Windows 98.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:01:

Anyway, at least I have a menu now. I will use that one, but I didn't really resolved my question unfortunately.

Most boot menus work along the same idea and keep a record of their location, so in you case it would be something like
IDE0-Disk1 = C:\
IDE0-Disk2 = D:\
IDE1-Disk1 = CDRom?
IDE1-Disk2 = N/A

but when you disconnected the C:\ the above table was no longer valid and now looked something like
IDE0-Disk1 = N/A
IDE0-Disk2 = C:\
IDE1-Disk1 = CDRom?
IDE1-Disk2 = N/A

So all its entries were incorrect. That's why you really want to keep all the HDD's connected the entire time.

The reason The inbuilt Windows one is working is it makes subtle changes to the boot files of c:\ (win98 drive) which is one of its limitations. If you format c:\ you'll also loose access to any other OS installed.
3rd party utilities usually create their own little partition or in your case a boot disk completely independent of any of the OS's installed

aha2940 wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:15:

I use "masterbooter" boot manager: https://github.com/nagydjol/masterbooter and it can boot anything from any hard drive. It can even hide partitions on the fly if that's needed. Not the most intuitive interface, but very well documented, and it even has that DOS look and feel.

I open the page but I find only various files without and .exe or a .com program, probably it has to be built. I don't know what to do here.

Anyway yes, my situation is this one:

IDE0-HD1=C:\ and it's windows98se with the 10gb hard disk by Samsung on MASTER
IDE0-HD2=D:\ and it's Windows XP with thge 40gb Maxtor on SLAVE
IDE1-DVD-R=E:\
IDE1-CD-R=F:\

Anyway I don't want to make other tries uninstalling al the operative system, so I will remain with the built-in Windows XP boot manager.

Probably I loss some theoric ideas in this part of work, I don't know what to think.

I am happy anyway to have the Windows XP bootmanager working and that's it.

I preferred to have the BootMGR that I used before in another system but I will not die if not.

Thanks all for the attention and the nice advices. At the end I met my goal.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 21:40:

I want to have the one hard disk with Windows XP, and the second one with Windows 98SE so I can play older games and DOS 7.0 games too.

You can install them onto the same disk and they will coexist just fine. Just install 98SE first, XP second.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 21:40:

I decided to install before the Windows 98SE on the 10GB Samsung hard disk, that is set to master, and Windows XP in the second 40GB Maxtor hard disk, that is set to slave. Both hard disk like you can imagine is in the same Primary IDE channel.

That's not a good idea, unless you have no choice. It's always better to use separate channels.

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 21:40:

If this program can't run properly do you have other solutions for me to select the operating system to boot?

Most motherboards made after a certain date (not sure what date, though) have an option where you can hit a key during power-on and it will present you with a menu to choose boot device (without having to manually change boot order in the BIOS setup each time).

biessea wrote on 2020-10-13, 21:40:

Remember, I would like to remain with TWO hard disk and TWO operating system.

What's the reason?

Cause I prefer to have two different hard disks for two different operating system, It's just a mine idea, I would like to mantain this situation.

My motherboard, a 2000 Asus motherboard, doesn't have the F8 function when starting the PC where you can select from which support starts the computer.

Anyway I think the discussion is closed, I'm fine with the Windows XP auto-menu for boot selection and in bios I select for the first option of boot the floppy disc, so I'm ok.

Thanks for all, like always, this forum is a great information and help place. Thanks a lot to all.

See you soon, for the next question, or maybe, help that I can give.

Loris

Here's how I setup Pentium4 with Win98 on Disk 1 and Dos6 and WinXp on Disk2. But at some point in the future, I moved away from it and simply installed each OS on its own drive and started switching Boot drive in BIOS. It makes it a lot more reliable if you're frequently messing around with drives, installs or if anything goes wrong:

Install Instructions
1) Connect Disk 1
2) Install Win98
3) Install Partition Magic 8
4) Use Partition Magic 8 to create 2GB FAT partition for MS-DOS at the begging of Disk1. Use Add OS Wizard to do the partitioning, it will tell you that MS-DOS must be the first partition on the disk.
5) Install MS DOS
6) Remove Disk 1
7) Connect Disk 2
8) Install XP on new Partition
9) Connect Disk 1
10) Ensure BIOS boot order is Disk1 and then Disk2
11) Install Plop from floppy to MBR on Disk 1
12) Configure Plop to bot DOS, Win98, WinXP

Btw, Plop was the only boot manager that worked for me when installing win98, DOS, XP on separate drives, and I tried a lot of them.

Although it's not period correct, I decided that I will use a front bay loading CF-IDE adapter with separate CF cards for each OS on systems I want to multi boot. It's much mode flexible, and as long as I use the same CF card for each install on the same system, it's plug and play. It also allows me to have multiple copies of the same OS optimised for games, benchmarks and any other use I may consider in the future.

Newer motherboards (like my Athlon 600 board) have full auto detect on all IDE ports. So if I leave them all to auto they will automatically adjust to what I have connected and boot from the first drive that is detected (is doesn’t even need to be the primary master). So then the CF in front setup is ideal.