First post, by retrofan011
I recently made a dual boot (Win98 and Win 7), on my Core2Duo machine from 2007, with Intel 945G + ICH7 chip set and 2Gb of Ram.
I followed all the procedures described many times and everything went surprisingly well, except for one thing.
When I chose Windows 98 from boot menu it doesnt detect the floppy drive at all, unless I manually set C partition as active.
It just doesn't see it at all, even mounts the CD ROM drive as A:, apparently treating it as the first free letter.
As a dual boot manager, I use EasyBCD, which keeps the boot files on the Win7 (D:) partition.
Win98 is naturally installed first on C and Win 7 later on secondary (D:) partition.
it works quite normally from boot menu, but without any sign of the floppy drive, which of course works perfectly with Win7.
So, If I want to have access to the floppy drive on Win98, I have to manually set the C: partition as active and reboot, but then I lose the dual boot menu and win7, because the computer directly boots Win98 only.
Then, If I use FDISK and change the active partition back to D: (Win7), I have a boot menu, both OSes boot, but the floppy drive is completely invisible to Win98 and its DOS 7.1
Interestingly, the CD ROM works normally in both cases, only the floppy is not available, when I start win98 from the boot menu.
My hard disk is connected to the SATA controller, but I overcome this with R.Loew patch and there were no problems with the installation.
IDE legacy mode is set in BIOS, the floppy controller is of course enabled, as well as the corresponding model (3.5" 1.44Mb).
I've been scratching my head for days about this, as I'm not much of a PC expert.
If anyone has an idea, how to get access to the floppy drive and keep the boot menu, please help.
btw, I also tried the desperate move, to place the EasyBCD boot files, on the win 98 partition and use the boot menu from there.
Although the C: partition remained active I still have no access to the floppy drive when I start win98 from the boot menu.
Maybe there is a conflict with the EasyBCD boot manager, but I don't know what kind.
Only when I manually set C: as active and reboot floppy drive becomes visible to win98/Dos, but then the computer acts as if it only has win98 on the hard drive and ignores win7 and the boot menu completely...