Could someone link me to some good advice on how to set up a dual boot system? Here's the situation:

I want to be able to play some of my old games again. Win2K isn't the best option for that type of thing. I want to set up a dual boot system with Win2K and Win98SE.

My drive config is:
-Device0: 80GB master w/Win2K (NTFS)
-Device1: 100GB slave for data files (NTFS)
-connected to an ATA Controller card is a 25GB HDD for a few archives (FAT32)

Obviously, I'd want to use the 25GB drive since I can't install Win98 on NTFS. My concern is whether or not this is possible. I would think that this would be easier than partitioning a drive with an OS already installed, but is what I want to do possible?

HELP! Okay, I have no idea what happened. I didn't do anything in my daul boot process and already my drives are screwing up! For some reason I cannot access my 100GB drive (drive D:). The first time I tried to enter it, it said something like "D:\ is not accessible The parammeter is incorrect"

Then I noticed that somehow, I have a new drive on my system called H:, and when I tried to open that drive I got the same error. Then when I tried D: again, I was told that the drive wasn't formatted, and it asked me if I wanted to format it! What's going on!? This drive has all of my important files on it. I have to access it!

is what I want to do possible?

I don't think so. AFAIR Windows 98 fails unless it occupies the active primary partition of the first disk. Win2K (or, at least, NT4, which was the last time I tried this) isn't so fussy and will happily go anywhere, so you could reshuffle your disks to do this -- at the expense of (probably) reinstalling Win2K in the "same" place, which has become a different drive letter.

Peter

Thanks, I can see that. Any idea why my drives have suddenly screwed up? The only thing I did to start this process was to boot the PC to the Win98 setup disk and go through a few steps to see if the setup would let me install to another drive. It didn't, so I quit. Now I can't access my most important drive! AH!

Couldn't tell you why you can't read that partition now. Except that I'm pretty sure Win98 copies some files (for Setup's GUI) to hard disk prior to actually installing Windows.

As for setting up a dual boot, I have done this exact same thing with Win98SE and Win2K, on a single drive. PartitionMagic (with BootMagic) made it quite an easy and painless process. If the dual boot is that important to you, or more than once you've found yourself wishing for partitions of a different size or type for whatever reason, it's well worth picking up.

BootMagic would work, but I would probably do this in the BIOS if I were him.

Many new motherboards with AMI bios will allow you to hit F8 at POST to select what drive to boot off of. Since the Promise controller is seen as a SCSI card, just hit F8 and tell it to boot off the Promise. Win98, I would assume, should not have a problem booting fine from the Promise controller even though other physical hard drives are present on the Pri/Sec IDE controller.

If that didn't work, I would imagine you could work some magic playing with boot.ini on the Pri Master partition. But, at that point, bootmagic is no-hassle and works great (the last time I used it).

Anyway, I don't think DiGNAN will be too worried about dual boot now. I've been talking with him through IM about this and it seems his D: drive is gone. I am not a data recovery wizard, so I was unable to give much advice.

I am going crazy. I can't believe a couple pre-setup steps in Win98 could kill a drive it didn't even have anything to do with.

Here is a pic of the disk management window. Maybe someone could tell me how screwed up this is:

Hi.

Did you have that 8MB partition at the end of the first drive before you booted the 98 CD? It seems likely that setup fiddled with your partition table during the pre-install tests, and win2k is now confused because it has a drive D: on the first drive, when it expects it to refer to the second one. Microsoft installers are buggers for mucking about with partition tables, riding roughshod over anything they don't recognise, and of course a 98 installer wouldn't recognise a Win2k boot partition directly although one would thing it would see it as NT at least.

Anyway, there is a program called "GetDataBack for NTFS", from www.runtime.org, which may help. I've used it in the past to recover from a similar problem, when win2k unilaterally ate a very important drive completely. The program recovered everything, although it took a while.

I'm not sure whether there is a free download, and the software costs about $130 or so, but if you're absolutely desperate PM me.

pca

Thanks for that info.

One more thing I found. I disconected the 100GB drive, and now there is still a C: and D: drive, but the H: drive has gone.

Do you ever recall converting your 100GB drive into a 'Dynamic Disk' in W2k? That bit is a little strange. Usually that'd be done on a W2k server w/o hardware RAID. They also complicate data recovery, as there are fewer tools to deal with corrupt DD's than with standard NTFS volumes.

-Zeke

Good call. I have no idea what that means, so no, I don't recall ever doing that. That is quite strange.

I am currently using that program that Patrick suggested. There was a free download on their site. So far, I'm not sure what the difference is in the demo. With my luck, it will show me the files, but not let me recover them

*edit*
by the way, after I'm done with this, I'm going to need to format that drive and attempt to get my system back in order. The problem is I don't know what the new D: drive is! How do I remove that?

Since it's mounted already, take a peek in 'D' and see if you see any files. If no, you're pretty safe in assuming it can be deleted (be sure it's not got any 'hidden' or 'system' files other than perhaps desktop.ini) Partition Magic is the way to go for repartitioning W2k & will have no problem deleting the runt partition and resizing your main one to span the whole disk. Good luck w/the recovery.

-Zeke

Beenn there done that. I think what happened with mine was that Win2k decided the drive was "new" and wrote it's "signature" on it thus killing the partition info. I was spanning volumes at the time too so when one drive went bust the whole volume did.

I got around 95% of my stuff back (mostly my MP3s) using a program called R-Studio NTFS here. Again not free but look hard enough and you will find it.

Or if you want you can PM me also....

Thanks, but Patrick's program is working great. I will be making sacrifices to him at my alter tonight. ALL HAIL PATRICK!

Anyway, thanks everyone. I got all my files back, important ones and not, and I'll hopefully be able to fix the partitions. You all turned a heart attack into mild indigestion. Thanks so much!!

I need some help again.

I've backed up all my data off the D: drive (the one Windows claims is unreadable), and now I need to get it back in working order.

I went into disk management, right-clicked on the drive, and chose "Revert to Basic Disk". I got the old hourglass-then-cursor-and-nothing-happens routine. I tried this several times to no effect.

I then tried Partition Magic 7. The wizard was unable to perform any operations on the drive, and the "Operations" menu was entirely grayed out whith the drive selected.

Lastly, I attempted a normal format via right-click in My Computer. Windows was unable to format it.

What now?

This is just a suggestion, but maybe you can remove the partition and immediately re-create it from within win2k (don't know how the utility utility is called in English. Disk management?)
Then try to format it again.

PM won't touch Dynamic Disks at all, which is why it's greyed out. I'd delete the partition w/windows disk manager then use PM to make a new one (or ones). HTH.

-Zeke

The problem was that I couldn't touch the drive with any programs or Disk Management utility. I was trying to find the hd_kill.com file that robricc had sent me a while back for erasing drives, but I think I got rid of it for safety reasons. I found a similar, but not as good utility at www.killdisk.com. It was really slow, though (took about 1.5 hours to do 25% of the disc, so at that point I stopped it.

However, I think that's all it took. Now at least Disk Manager recognizes the drive, and I'm currently using Partition Magic to recreate the partition. Everything should be back to normal soon, therefore you should expect another post later with me screaming about how my computer exploded and caught my house on fire.

Thanks for all the help!

No problem!
Maybe it's time to put the fire extinguisher at armslength now?

Oh. If you just wanted to kill all of the partitions on the drive then it's simple. Just overwrite the first few sectors on the HD and you'll overwrite the MBR and partition table. You don't actually need for it to wipe the entire disk

- Trevor

Oh. If you just wanted to kill all of the partitions on the drive then it's simple. Just overwrite the first few sectors on the HD and you'll overwrite the MBR and partition table. You don't actually need for it to wipe the entire disk

- Trevor

Yeah, that's what I concluded. That's the reason I didn't feel bad ending the program before it was completed. It's just that Rob's program was a simple .com file and it wiped the other disk I used it on clean in no time. I guess it was just a more efficient killer

*edit*
As part of this process, I have to go and un-Read only all my files. I know this is a simple task of selecting them all and unchecking the Read Only box, but:
a) why does Windows automatically make every file copied from a CD/DVD Read Only
b) can I make it stop that?

It's only been a problem so far in that Outlook Express couldn't open the store folder when all the files were RO.