HELP!! Dual-boot blues!!

w^rl0rd

I am creating a dual-boot system so I can practice for the OS exam. I have a 20 GB HD that will consist of four 5 GB partitions, one for each OS; Win '98, WinNT, Win2K, and WinXP. I have already installed Win '98 and set it to active. However, when I boot to the WinNT CD, I receive a message stating that it could not be installed. I tried running the CD from Win '98 and got the following error message:

Setup was unable to install Windows NT Boot Loader.
Insure that your C: drive is formatted and that the drive is not damaged.
Setup cannot continue. Press ENTER to exit.

What am I doing wrong? The hard drive is fine, I installed Win '98 without any problems.

Webmaster

My guess is that you formatted the C: drive with the FAT32 file system...

w^rl0rd

Well yeah, Win '98 is on my C drive. I have an extended partition set up and have tried using a FAT and FAT-32 logical drive to install NT on but it isn't working. Besides, Win '98 should be on a FAT 32 partition anyway. Right? Since it is the first OS to be installed, it should be set to C. Right?

Should I have formatted the Win '98 partition to FAT-16?

Webmaster

- Reformat the drive with FAT16 (if you do it with fdisk in windows 98, select no when asked for large disk support)
- Reinstall Windows 98 (on the FAT16)
- Install Windows NT 4 on another partition (create, and format it NTFS, during NT Setup)

Should work perfectly...

In your multi-boot configuration the C: disk cannot be FAT32. Since Windows NT cannot access it, and it should be able to access it for the windows nt startup files. Windows NT will boot Windows 98... When you install Windows NT 4 it will take the boot sector created by Windows 98 and put it in a file bootsect.dos, which is referred to in the boot.ini file (this file will be loaded when you choose Windows 98 from the startup options in the boot menu).

When you install Windows 2000 and XP, do not upgrade the NTFS version of the partition where NT 4 resides from 4 to 5, unless you installed NT 4 SP 3... or was it SP 5, yes I think so, but anyway the latest service pack will do

lazyart

Are you planning to take the 2001 objectives or the 2003? If the former, you won't need XP...

And just to add, you can make the partition that 2000 or XP resides NTFS4 or 5 (in fact you should so you can get a feel for the compression & encryption abilities).

bellboy

for nt to boot, regardless of the file system of the partition or logical drive you wish to install it on, the primary partition must be fat or ntfs4, as nt will install certain files there that it needs to boot.

w^rl0rd

Thanks Webmaster, Bellboy, and Lazyart. It worked! Unfortunately, I can't get NT to detect my USB mouse. Any more tips? In the setup process it asks what kind of mouse I have but USB wasn't one of the options. I tried 3 of the options but it still won't detect my mouse. Has anyone experienced this issue? If so, can you help me? I want my mouse!!

w^rl0rd

Wait...I think I stumbled on something. NT doesn't support USB does it? Actually, I think there are drivers you can install, but it is not supported natively. Right?

RussS

hmm - when you check in device manager does anything show up?

I had an XP machine on my bench yesterday that didn't recognise the mouse and it was the USB controller with a screwed driver that caused it.

RussS

I think you hit the nail on the head shinobi. My NT machine needed the driver pack from the MoBo disk to sort out sound/video & mouse from memory.

theBard

You are correct... NT does not natively support USB, this is at least in my opinion one of the big advances 2000 has over the 4.0 platform