Reply 20 of 25, by feipoa
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@SquallStrife
It worked! Your help was most appreciated. It saved me quite a bit of searching and reading. I can now boot to Win98, NT4, and W2K using the default W2K bootloader and the partition sizes I wanted. I used dd-0.5.zip, and for my configuration, the dd command used was:
dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3 of=bootsect.w98 bs=512 count=1
Then added,
c:\bootsect.w98="Windows 98"
to the boot.ini file on the W2K partition.
There is only one thing left to do, get XP Pro installed. I have 12000 MB for this final partition. The options are to install WinXP:
1. After Win98SE as FAT32
2. After Win98SE as NTFS
3. After W2K, but before Win98SE, as FAT32
4. After W2K, but before Win98SE, as NTFS
I'm going to opt for option 4. first. I recall how W2K didn't like being behind the 8 GB barrier, but I'm hoping XP has a workaround for this. If it fails, I'll try option 3, then 1.
Will I need to recreate the bootsect.w98 file after the Win98 partition becomes \Partition4 ?
EDIT: I've noticed a lot of problems come along during this process of moving partitions and installing a new OS. As I am installing XP right now with option 4, XP setup thinks the XP partition is #4, so it sets the boot.ini according to this. But after the first phase of installation and a reboot occurs, Windows can no longer boot intself because the partition is really partition #3. So you need to use the Partition Magic Rescue discs to set the WINNT partition as active, boot into NT4, then change the boot.ini on XP partition to reflect that it is partition #3. I had to do something similiar with the W2K installation as well, but the changing of the partitions came at some point later when I unhid all the other partitions. Again, boot into NT4 to correct the partition number on the boot.ini for the W2K partition.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.