Hi everyone. Sorry for the newbie-type question. I currently have Win 98 installed on my main drive. I plan to get a 2nd harddisk drive which I'll divide into 2 partitions, one of which I wish to install Win XP Home Edition.

I have the upgrade (retail) version of XP, but I was wondering is there any installation limitations with the upgrade version of Win XP compared to the "full" version when it comes to Dual O/S installations? (ie:Windows 98 on drive "C", & Windows XP on drive "D" )

I've read that when you multi O/S install a menu is created to choose your default O/S on boot up, if you later uninstalled XP how do you delete the menu-I've read varing accounts of something involving FDISK mbr or something involving a boot ini file, which is more straightforward?

Btw, is it better to install XP SP1 before or after Product Activation, video card drivers,soundcard drivers, Programs etc.

Thank you for any info anyone can provide!

If you are going to only have XP as an OS.

1) Back up your data
2) Format you HHD
3) Install XP, when it ask for the previos OS put you Win 98 cd in you cdrom and point the install to the cdrom

IF you want to dual boot put each OS on its' own seperate partition.

Never "upgrade" from one one OS to another especially from a DOS based OS to a NT kernel OS. You will cause youself more headaches then you can count.

When dual/multi booting with any Windows OS you want to install
the the oldest OS to the newest OS last. Windows will auitomatically handle the boot prosess.

If you you Dual boot with 98 & XP you drives must be Formatted in FAT32. If they are3 formatted in NTFS the Win 98 will not be able to read them.

If you bought XP recently then it might have SP1 already apart of it. IF not, Install SP1 after installing the OS and before the drivers.

The simple answer is that their should be no difference between the full & upgrade install of WinXP in relation to how it handels dual booting between multiple operating systems.

In the scenario you have: an upgrade of a win9x system both filesystems must be FAT32.

My memory is a little foggy on this but I'm pretty sure all MS operating systems must be installed on the first hard drive (C: ) in whats called a primary partition so installing winxp onto the D: drive may not be possible.

(you can clone the contents of C: onto D: but it requires software like Nortons Ghost program)

A bootloader is installed into the MBR (master boot record) which can boot just a single operating system or multiple one's. Even if you remove an OS the bootloader can still reside their but you can remove it by repairing the MBR with tools dependant of the version of the OS your using e.g. if you wanted to repair the mbr of winxp you would boot to the recovery console and type in "fix mbr" and "fix boot"

You can also do it under win98 I think (it's been a while since I used it) via the fdisk /mbr switch.

Also check out the MS KNB of how to use fdisk and its commands
Link

my windows xp is on my f drive.

I might clarify that it doesnt have to be the c: drive in particular just that the first physical drive in the system (which is usually c: ).


But I'm sure windows NT can boot from a logical partition, but the windows NT boot program must be in the active primary partition on the first hard disk which would work of course if your dual booting with win98.

Like I said I'm not certain if that condition still applies, it did around the era of WinNT4 and win98.

Haven't tested the inbuilt options of MS's dual boot for a long time as I've been using Partition magic to manage multiple OS's but your probably right in that you can install winxp in any partition as long as it is a primary one regardless of which drive now.

This is true only for the DOS based OSes, 2k and XP can be installed on any partition.

Thank you everyone for the input, so far so good, although I'm still installing applications into XP, so its a wait & see.

I installed Win 98 & Win 2000 on seperate partitions with no problems.