The XUB can allow you to boot from other IDE drives at boot time through the boot menu. You could just install each drive with the OS as normal separately, and then connect one of them as secondary master or a slave and use XUB to boot from it when desired.

I don't have any experience with this, but I'm guessing you need a boot loader and it seems that most boot loaders support booting from 2nd harddisk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders

Why would you even want to dual-boot DOS 6 and Win 98?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:37:

The XUB can allow you to boot from other IDE drives at boot time through the boot menu. You could just install each drive with the OS as normal separately, and then connect one of them as secondary master or a slave and use XUB to boot from it when desired.

Do you have any links? I'm finding everything from hiking boots to Texas water tables on Google...closest seems to be a bunch of Ubuntu (Linux) posts, or a special XUB BIOS perhaps - is that it? Don't think I'm of the level that I want to start messing with a custom BIOS quite yet...

BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:41:

I don't have any experience with this, but I'm guessing you need a boot loader and it seems that most boot loaders support booting from 2nd harddisk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders

Thanks, there's so many there I have no clue where to start... I've never edited the MBR or VBR before which is seems like most of those call for (more research is definitely needed).

dr_st wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:43:

Why would you even want to dual-boot DOS 6 and Win 98?

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:22:

And yes, I totally know I can boot Win98 into MS-DOS mode but that's not my question 😉

Why not? I can play like 99.9% of these games on DosBOX a LOT easier, and a LOT cheaper, and a metric crapton less hassle (I'm how many 100's of hours into this 'hobby' so far 🤣)...yet a lot of us on this forum choose not too do that and play on native hardware.... I want a computer that boots into native DOS like I had when I was 10 years old in 1988. No harm in that, right?

most Linux installation come with grub.
I use it for almost the same thing on my "normal" PC, starting Ubuntu from the SSD or Windows from the HDD.
Never had any issues. You can set a default and countdown, so all you need to do is turn on the machine.
IIRC, it pretty much recognizes and incorporates every OS it finds upon installation.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/126541/how-to … all-boot-loader

http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/binaries/

It's not a custom BIOS, just an option ROM that takes over disk handling from the system BIOS.

Something to maybe try down the road once you've got a stable foundation

dr_st wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:43:

Why would you even want to dual-boot DOS 6 and Win 98?

I am sure it isn't same in all the system, but my win98se system I have had several compatibility issues when booting to dos 7.1. Some software just freeze or hang in it and if I choose to Load previous dos version in F8 boot menu to load dos 6.22 they run just fine without problems.

Can you name specific examples of such SW?

You also have to rule out differences in startup files (Config/Autoexec). Or are you saying that they were configured exactly the same way between DOS6 and DOS7 and still some software behaves differently?

dr_st wrote on 2020-02-23, 18:54:

Can you name specific examples of such SW?

You also have to rule out differences in startup files (Config/Autoexec). Or are you saying that they were configured exactly the same way between DOS6 and DOS7 and still some software behaves differently?

For example speedsys hangs when I run it in dos 7.1 when it says it is reading SRMs on my Pentium 3 but runs just fine when I reboot to dos 6.22. Both load same things in config.sys/autoexec.bat. Just memory managers, cd-rom drivers/mscdex, AWE64 drivers and cute mouse. This was first thing that came to my mind. There was also another software that just said you can't run it under windows if you have dos 7.1 running, but I don't remember which one was that because it has been couple years.

The other one is probably CTCM/CTCU because it checks for WINBOOTDIR environment variable. I have a fix for that.

In other words, nothing meaningful.

I've never used a third-party boot manager before, just whatever came with some alternative OS that I was using. Like GRUB for Linux, and the BeOS boot manager. GRUB is very powerful but at least with the versions of Linux I use, you have to invest some effort into setting them up. Not trivial unless you're familiar with Linux -- in which case you would know about it and don't need to ask for suggestions. The Be boot manager is very easy to use, and technically you can install it from the BeOS install CD. Seems a little out-of-the-way just to get a boot menu, but I don't know what common options exist for just boot managers without a sidecar OS.

One problem I would expect to see -- and this may be my own ignorance from never having booted two early Microsoft OSes on the same disk before: DOS and Windows are accustomed to being the first, and preferably only, OS on the drive. The drive letter C: is the first FAT partition it finds, while D: is the second FAT partition, and so on, irrespective of which partition was selected to boot from. So what happens when you install Windows 98 on C:, then move that to the secondary disk and now it's D: because the DOS partition is first? I suppose you could make sure Win98 is on the first disk, and uses FAT32 so it won't be detected by DOS. Is that how one would do it?

Btw there is Grub2Win, an installer GUI to install Grub from inside Windows if the usual Grub install via Linux is too difficult to figure out. I never tried it myself but here is the link to it:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub2win/

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-22, 20:22:

The last time I tried to have both MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 98 on my computer people said it's easy: just install MS-DOS, then when you install Windows 98 SE after it's done you'll get a boot menu automatically popping up on boot to choose what to boot into....I think those couple peoples posts I read confused (or I did...) that with dual booting Win95 and Win98, or Win98 and XP or something - I tried that and no boot menu was created, it just booted into Windows 98.

The boot menu does not show by default unless you add an option to MSDOS.SYS. Otherwise, as Baoran said, you have to press F8 at startup to get the menu to appear.

SirNickity wrote on 2020-02-25, 19:29:

So what happens when you install Windows 98 on C:, then move that to the secondary disk and now it's D: because the DOS partition is first? I suppose you could make sure Win98 is on the first disk, and uses FAT32 so it won't be detected by DOS. Is that how one would do it?

It will be D when you boot from DOS, but if you boot from Windows again, whatever you're using (like a boot manager or a BIOS menu) will result in Windows booting from C again.

I actually started looking for a pre-made IDE cable with a switch to select which HDD on that cable boots up (both drives will be set to cable select). There's bunch of tutorials on how to do it online, but I was hoping to find one pre-made. This way I can have a little switch (the front of my case has a good overhang so I could hide a switch there sight-unseen pretty easily) which could boot from my 2gb CF flash card with DOS, or when that switch is off boot from my regular 120gb HDD for Windows 98.

I'd just use a DOS 6 boot disk whose autoexec.bat changes from A: to whatever HDD was partitioned and formatted with DOS 6. Then just ignore the Windows 98 HDD, which should be the normal boot drive.

So did you ever get a working win98 install?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-03-05, 15:41:

So did you ever get a working win98 install?

Yes I did man. Just updated the topic on it in fact. Looking for some final advice on how to tackle the last couple things if you want to take a look - always appreciated.

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-03-05, 15:15:

I actually started looking for a pre-made IDE cable with a switch to select which HDD on that cable boots up (both drives will be set to cable select). There's bunch of tutorials on how to do it online, but I was hoping to find one pre-made. This way I can have a little switch (the front of my case has a good overhang so I could hide a switch there sight-unseen pretty easily) which could boot from my 2gb CF flash card with DOS, or when that switch is off boot from my regular 120gb HDD for Windows 98.

You ever use your keyboard lock switch? Just an idea...

I revive this post from the last year, just to say that today I have the same situation of the OP.

I have DOS 6.22 perfectly configurated for my Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA card, 3dfx Banshee video card on my AMD K6-2+ 400MHZ processor.

I have another hard disk with Windows 98 to run light newer video games.

I will try (I used before in other system) Multi Boot Manager, and I will give you results about that. I don't know if anyone of you knows that boot manager, It stay in a floppy drive and making the system start from the floppy it will modifiy de MBR of the primary disc, that I will set as master the DOS 6.22 disk.

Let's see, the boot manager is this one: