First post, by feipoa
- Rank
- l33t++
I have been having trouble setting up tri- and quad-boot Windows operating systems. The purpose of this is to test how various Windows OS's affect older hardware and to see how different games play in various Windows operating systems.
I have this system to test the various scenarios on: K6-III+ 450, (i430Tx) w/256 MB SDRAM, 34 GB IDE hard disk,
This is the objective I would like to setup on 1 HDD:
Win98SE, FAT32, 8 GB
WinNT 4.0, NTFS, 4 GB
Win2000, NTFS, 8 GB
WinXP Pro, NTFS, 12 GB
How would you recommend going about this? Set all partitions to primary hard disks, or put all partitions under one Primary with 4 logical partitions under one Extended partition?
Another thought is that Windows NT 4.0 might need to be installed first so that Win98SE can remain FAT32. But after installing Win98SE, it will take over the MBR and kill the boat loader. So I might need to install Win98SE first, but leave 4 GB unallocated on the first section of the HDD to install NT 4.0 on later. But is Win98 still bootable, being not within the first 2 GB of the drive?
Alternately, I could also reconfigure the HD with Partition Magic such that all discs are Primary:
1. 4 GB NTFS, NT4
2. 8 GB FAT32, Win98
3. 8 GB NTFS, W2K
4. 12 GB NTFS, WinXP
... And then install the OS's in the order presented? Or will W2K and WinXP still need to put their ntldr on the first drive, making it so that NT4 cannot load due to a different NTFS version inherent to W2K/XP?
This is what I have tried installing so far, in this order,
1. Win98SE, FAT16, 2GB (Primary DOS, created in Fdisk)
2. WinNT4, NTFS, 4 GB (Logical drive in Extended - NT4 setup defaults)
From this point, the system works fine as dual-boot in both OS's
3. Win2000, NTFS, 8 GB (Logical drive in Extended DOS - setup defaults)
At this point, WinNT has been removed from the boot loader and only Win98 and W2K can boot. I tried editing the boot.ini file to re-add NT4, but I get errors at boot.
How do we make WinNT 4.0 bootable again in this configuration? I feel that NT4 can no longer load because it cannot read certain files after W2K updates the NTFS file system.
This is something else I tried which does work, but it is not very optimal,
1. Win98SE, FAT16, 2GB (Primary DOS, created with FDISK)
2. WinNT4, FAT16, 2GB (Logical drive in Extended - nt4 setup defaults)
3. Win2K, FAT16, 2GB (same as above)
4. Not yet tried to install XP with defaults. The default Extended DOS partition is only 8 GB. I suppose I could create it in FDISK before installing WinNT and make it 30GB, but 2 GB FAT HDDs are not so ideal. By default, Windows NT4.0 creates an Extended DOS partition, whereby the max size is 8 GB. Why? Can it be larger? Can we mix FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS on one extended partition with logical drives?
I wonder if I could create a 4 GB FAT partition for WinNT and an 8 GB FAT32 partition for W2K and have the boot manager still recognise all OS's?
Anyway, after step 3, I had attempted to convert the W2K FAT16 (or was it NT4?) partition to NTFS, but then WinNT4 disappeared from the NT boot loader option. Perhaps as long as W2K is not converted to NTFS it will be OK?
I tried fooling around with System Commander 2000, but it isn't working as well as I thought it would for this configuration. After installing Win98SE, I told it I wanted to install NT4, and it created unallocated space infront of Win98SE, but it only wanted to create a max of 2 GB for NT4. I know NT4 can have FAT16 partitions up to 4 GB. I got fed up with the System Commander boot loader at this point and didn't proceed.
Has anyone successfully booted from one HDD: Win98, WinNT, W2K, and WinXP? If so, how EXACTLY did you set it up?
If I only wanted WinNT, W2K, and WinXP, it would be very straight forward. Win98 and NT is OK, Win98 and W2K is OK, but getting Win9x installed with NT4 and one other NT-like OS has been problematic with the Windows-default installation scheme and boot loader.
Any detailed help would be much appreciated!
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