And Master Booter: I'm still confused. I was thinking this partition hiding thing was going to let me get both OS's as seeing their partitions as C:, but I'm now thinking that the hiding has nothing to do with makeing partitions active. Is that right? What I'd need is a boot loader that could be configured to make the partition it is booting the only active one.

Weird! I got my friends computer to dual boot, but what a rigmarole.

Firstly FIXBOOT doesn't create BOOTSECT.DOS. Ah ha, though: I'd played safe and used a thing mentioned before to save the W98 boot sector... bugger, I'd used it wrongly (not sure how), and my BOOTSECT.DOS was 512 bytes of zeros. So now I have a damaged W98 intallation. My boot menu came up, and I could boot XP, but I couldn't boot W98 without a valid BOOTSECT.DOS

Never mind, I'll use FDISK /MBR to put it right. But that didn't work, and - well - you wouldn't expect it to really because I'd overwritten the boot sector on C not the mbr. Strange thing though, after FDISK /MBR I lost my boot menu, and it booted straight to XP which was on the slave... wwhhatt!

Ah, well, I'll reinstall W98, so that I can have a second go at grabbing the boot sector. But, W98 was too clever. It noticed signs of XP, and set up a dual boot just like XP would, creating a BOOTSECT.DOS and adding a line to boot.ini to do it, except it did this on the slave.

Then for a while I thought I had it working. I rebooted, accidently let the W98 installation CD boot, but when it said HDD or CD I selected HDD. This gave me a boot menu, with XP and W98 on, and both worked. I could tell from the contents this was the boot.ini that lived on the slave.

But then I took the CD out, and this gave me the boot menu from the master, and I was back to XP working and W98 not. I triec copying the known good BOOTSECT.DOS from slave to master, but that didn't help. Going back to using the W98 installation CD and then selecting HDD still worked, but a direct boot didn't.

Just as a wild guess I changed the BIOS to boot from HD2 rather than HD1, and bing! it works. I haven't slightest idea how it is working one way and not the other, but I think I'm going to give up trying to understand it.

One more strange thing. Now I have XP running with the master/slave swapped in comparisen with how they were when XP was installed, so I should need to rename the discs. But no, XP sussed it for itself, somehow.

I must admit, if I was reading this, I wouldn't believe it. I'd think "no, he must have swapped the master/slave back again or something half way through". Yeh, yeh. Actually, anybody reading this, for the sake of your sanity, I strongly suggest, don't believe any of this. 😁

MiniMax wrote:

> Can't use VMWare, because the main thing I need W98 for is testing Glidos .....

Never tried Glidos, but what prevents it from running in VMware/Virtual PC/Bochs? Incomplete emulation?

GliDOS makes use of a wrapper that wraps old Glide calls to OpenGL. (Optionally, you can use another wrapper that wraps to Direct3D.)

AFAIK, no virtual PC application yet supports 3D hardware acceleration.

OTOH, great thread. I'll be referring to this in the future.