What do you mean by "logical partition"? You can have 4 primary partitions in an MBR. Win2k should be able to live on any of those.

Installing the VBR (which is 7 sectors long BTW) and populating the BPB with the correct values to make it boot has always been more complicated than it should be. Use disk manager or BOOTSECT.EXE from a running Windows NT OS, use a sector editor, or use some third party utility.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/ has literally your case 😀

In short - clone a known working installation to the logical partition (copying individual bootloader files may be possible for 2000 but is asking for trouble in DOS-based stuff), edit the NTFS header so that it has the correct "hidden sectors" = starting LBA, and the boot.ini to point at the right partition number!

grub4dos can also boot ntldr directly.

But I don't think the hard part is getting ntldr to boot, but rather getting ntldr to collaborate. ntldr, specially pre-XP versions, is full of bugs. It hardcodes looking for ntdetect, boot.ini, etc. on the active primary partition. It will get confused if the VBR on memory used to boot it doesn't match the one from the active partition on the disk. Etc.

Doesn't booting like this with another active primary partition cause Windows to be on the D drive and the C drive to be whatever else was primary?

I remember having weird problems the last time I experimented with this.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-13, 18:28:

Doesn't booting like this with another active primary partition cause Windows to be on the D drive and the C drive to be whatever else was primary?

I remember having weird problems the last time I experimented with this.

Yes, but this is a cosmetic issue mostly. I am not sure why it annoys people so much. And drive letters can be rearranged, even the system drive, on NT post-installation (I once did it just with regedit...).

It's more than cosmetic. There are a lot of games and software that assume that Windows and Program Files is on the C drive. It causes a lot of headache on those corner cases.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-14, 17:39:

It's more than cosmetic. There are a lot of games and software that assume that Windows and Program Files is on the C drive. It causes a lot of headache on those corner cases.

I would change alot to very few.

Ever since we got our P2 in 1999, I've typically had the below setup.
C:\ Win9x
D:\ Data, Games, Etc
E:\NT4, 2k or XP (depending on the era)

Only game I can remember not liking that setup was Hi Octane, which was a dos game that wanted its own folder in the root of c:\

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-14, 17:39:

It's more than cosmetic. There are a lot of games and software that assume that Windows and Program Files is on the C drive. It causes a lot of headache on those corner cases.

But such software would also break on all non-english versions of windows, since Program Files will not be called "Program Files". Or does software out there actually hardcode "C:\$LOCATION_OF_PROGRAM_FILES" (assume the directory name is variable while the drive letter is not?).

javispedro1 wrote on 2024-11-14, 22:50:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-11-14, 17:39:

It's more than cosmetic. There are a lot of games and software that assume that Windows and Program Files is on the C drive. It causes a lot of headache on those corner cases.

But such software would also break on all non-english versions of windows, since Program Files will not be called "Program Files". Or does software out there actually hardcode "C:\$LOCATION_OF_PROGRAM_FILES" (assume the directory name is variable while the drive letter is not?).

Badly written software is programmed to common locations, like c:\program files. I remember it been a bit of an issue when profiles moved from :\documents and settings to :\users
I found accounting software was the worst. I guess as its a small market as each county has it's own preferred software.

However most software is programmed to use variables, eg %SystemRoot% will always take you to windows folder of the copy of windows you booted from, even if its a different name and/or drive