micmic wrote:So the procedure for unhidden partitions is as described in this page ? Assuming one optical drive, MS-DOS would be on C, Win98 on E and WinXP on F, correct ?
But if Win98 requires the boot files to be on C, how can one boot to MS-DOS 6.22 when partitions are unhidden ?
In Dos and WIN9X, hard drives are always mapped before optical drives so you would have C, D and E hard drives in your example and the CD would be F unless you assign it to a different letter. I always specify the drive letter of my CD to avoid it changing to a different letter if I add another drive/partition in the future. My CD is currently set to K in all my OS's. I used to use X but I found there are some games that search your drives for the CD and for some reason stop at letter O and quit searching.
Here's a quick run down on how drive letters are mapped in Dos and Win9x:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment
To make things the least confusing, you would want only 1 primary partion on the first phyisical drive and if you want to run DOS 6 that would need to be a FAT16 partition. Any other partions on the 1st drive and other drives would all be Extended partitions (FAT32 if you want them to be seen by both XP and Win9x)
Win9X can be installed on another drive (mine's installed on D). It needs to have a few files on C (msdos.sys/command.com/io.sys) and msdos.sys has the information needed to tell Win9X where the rest of its files are at.
What that MS article is referring to, is if you install Win9x on a machine that already has DOS 6 on it, you will get an option to keep your old OS and Win9X will configure a menu choice that is available when you hit F8 during boot that will allow you to choose Old Version of MS/DOS. It keeps copies of your dos config.sys/io.sys/msdos.sys/autoexec.bat and copies them back over prior to the boot so the computer boots into DOS 6.
If you then subsequently install WinXP it will replace your boot sector with one that gives you an option to start either WinXP or Win9x. To get to DOS 6, you would have to first choose Win9X, then hit F8 and choose Old DOS, so you would have to go through 2 separate menus that way. There are 3rd party boot managers that would present you a menu with all 3 choices or you can just boot DOS from a floppy (which is what I do)
Theoretically you could install DOS/Win98/WinXP all on the C partition in separate subdirectories, the boot manager does permit that. However I don't recommend for a couple of reasons, first is that since it's a FAT16 partition, you are limited in space and even if you install all of your apps on another partition, a lot of them install DLLs and other stuff into the windows system directories and eventually you will run out of space. Second is that certain programs such as IE will install to a common program files directory in both Win98 and WinXP so they will end up overwriting each others IE versions and generally causing problems.