The fact the boot menu comes up and 98 works fine would seem to suggest the MBR is actually fine.

Maybe its a simple case of modifying c:\boot.ini
if it's on the 2nd partition it should read
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

and yes you can modify what's between the " " back to WinXP

I'm not 100% confident if this will work, I've always done oldest OS first and thought ghost was smart enough to work this stuff out but it definitely wont break anything either

Thanks, I'll give that a shot over the weekend. Worst case, I'll reinstall - I don't know if XP deletes everything prior to installing (like DOS does, at least everything in the DOS directory)
so if my drivers are there, they should be picked up. Just in case, I'm going to note the files and names so if I have to, I can download them.

I would try a bootloader like GRUB, Plop, or GAG.

yes what chinny said your boot.ini is wrecked. You can fix it. the boot ini should be on the win 98 c drive with the ntloader files. its not the mbr.

if that doesn't work for you than just fully install XP on the 2nd partition instead, then copy your old xp.

Warlord wrote on 2021-02-05, 07:03:

if that doesn't work for you than just fully install XP on the 2nd partition instead, then copy your old xp.

Yep, tedious re-installation is under way - BOOT.INI was rebuilt twice, no dice. Either way, still better than reinstalling BOTH OS-es.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-02-03, 04:45:

So I installed 98 on this extra 40 GB hard disk (8 GB FAT32) and I partitioned the extra 32 GB to NTFS (using the XP installer off CD) and then rebooted it when the first XP files started copying to the NTFS partition.

My question would be if you partitioned the extra 32 GB as a logical partition within an extended partition, or if you created a second primary partition. But I guess it's too late for such questions.

I don't actually recall now, but by a happy accident, I copied a win98/XP installation off whatever computer I had with that configuration (XP/98 - I believe it was an NEC based Celeron) and naturally I had to reinstall XP (which was mostly done unattended, I was studying on my laptop as it was doing its thing) and by some fluke chance, the drivers for the sound I had on 98SE actually worked with the computer, something that I've been trying to do for some time:

QDI Legend PlatiniX 2 drivers required for Win98

So, that worked out!