Booting from different drives from BIOS is by far the most hassle-free way of doing different OSs on the same system, as the OSs themselves don't need to be aware of each other.

TBH for the same reason I don't want the drives to even talk to each other, what I generally do is a single 'data' drive for shared stuff, with some generally supported file system (with these two I'd go for FAT32), and then keep the OSs on their own disk with their own FS, so XP on NTFS. That would prevent 98 from even detecting it, so also from messing with it. XP would of course identify the FAT32 disk Win98 is running on, but you can decide to remove drive letter allocation in Disk Management to avoid it doing anything.

In that case, you'd have SSD1 with Win98, SSD2 with WinXP and HDD3 with shared FAT32 data.

Running Win98, its boot partition would be C: and data would be D:, running WinXP its boot partition would be C: and D: would still be data.

Thanks Dionb
That is kinda what I was thinking but surprisingly little info out there on the net about it

Rich

I have always used a Bootmanager, like that you get with ExtendedFdisk or the one you get from Os2 installation disks.
During a short period, I just used the one that came with any Linux distro. My data drive, have always been a second physical drive, until I began using laptops.

dionb wrote:

Booting from different drives from BIOS is by far the most hassle-free way of doing different OSs on the same system, as the OSs themselves don't need to be aware of each other.

Is possible using 1 hd "C" for wwin98 and another hd "E" for xp? I remember some old thread about installing win98
first and the xp will make a boot menu to select the OS. I just made dual boot with xp/7 in the past and the boot menu showed up ( Installed xxp first).

MKT_Gundam wrote:

dionb wrote:

Booting from different drives from BIOS is by far the most hassle-free way of doing different OSs on the same system, as the OSs themselves don't need to be aware of each other.

Is possible using 1 hd "C" for wwin98 and another hd "E" for xp? I remember some old thread about installing win98
first and the xp will make a boot menu to select the OS. I just made dual boot with xp/7 in the past and the boot menu showed up ( Installed xxp first).

It's possible from what I recall but I wouldn't do it. Boot managers get messy real quickly and Windows 98 tends to be the "main" drive if you install in that order (and the other way round won't work) so if you ever remove the Windows 98 drive, XP will no longer boot. Unless you partition the drive, it's asking for issues and partitioning has its own mess of problems.

Personally, I go with the very old manual method: I have a case where the side panel clicks into place so I can remove it in a second and just swap power leads between drives. Disabling drives in BIOS is another way as has been mentioned and a third possible way, is to use a front bay that you can slot drives into - lets you swap drives (similar to SCSI bays in servers) - but I've only seen others use this and never used it myself.

Dual booting 98 and XP shouldn't be too hard. You won't need a third party bootloader for that. You just need to partition the hard drive Into two parts.

Install Windows 98 onto your first partion. Format using FAT32 filesystem, don't use a partition size too much over 100 gig (look up the exact limit for 98). Then install XP onto your other partition using NTFS. Windows 98 will not "see" the XP partition at all, because it can't read NTFS. That's literally all you need to do and the Windows Bootloader will automatically give you the option at startup.

This is what I've done on one of my 98 machines in the last month so its pretty fresh in memory. Closest thing to a problem I've had is accidently installing XP era games on the wrong drive (because 98 is C:\ and game installers always choose that by default).

dionb wrote:

Booting from different drives from BIOS is by far the most hassle-free way of doing different OSs on the same system, as the OSs themselves don't need to be aware of each other.

It's hassle-free for the OS, sure, but you still have to manually invoke the BIOS boot menu during POST if you want to boot anything but the default; that is, unless you have BIOS that allows this to be done automatically (most of them don't, as far as I know).

dionb wrote:

Running Win98, its boot partition would be C: and data would be D:, running WinXP its boot partition would be C: and D: would still be data.

Honestly, I'm not sure it's so hard to get this to work even with all the OSes on the same drive, and no third-party boot managers. It certainly works for more advanced versions of Windows. I have a Win7/Win8.1 dual boot, where each one sees itself as C:, the shared data as D: and the other as E: (and if I wanted, I could hide the E: drive letter, as you said). Possibly Win98 does not allow for such flexibility, but XP should, and it should be enough.

Nintendawg wrote:

Dual booting 98 and XP shouldn't be too hard. You won't need a third party bootloader for that. You just need to partition the hard drive Into two parts.

Yep; a boot manager is rarely "necessary" when dealing with only Windows installs, as typically the newer Windows boot manager knows how to handle the older OS. So as long as you install in the correct order, like you said, it should work fine. It's only people who have some strange obsession about "hiding" one of the OSes from the other that find the need to mess with third-party tools.

If you want to mix different system types (like Windows, Linux, multiple flavors of each, etc.) then of course a proper boot manager is required.

I used two methods for W98 + WinXP.
1) One HDD with 2 partitions - first 98 and second XP
2) Two different HDD for each OS. Then change "Boot Device Priority" in BIOS
Second method i liked more. And once i made mistake - i booted W98 with 500Gb HDD connected. File system was broken because there was no Intel Application Accelerator (as i recall) installed in W98. So be careful with 98 😀

or just install 98 on the 1st drive and XP on a 2nd one, use the XP bootloader