Hello, I''ve been running Windows XP Professional on the ol'' machine for a while now, and I want to break up my had into a few different partitions for different OSes. I had some questions for those of you more familiar in this territory. I used (a not-exactly-legal copy of) Partition Magic 8.0 to shrink my NTFS partition down and make a FAT32 partition. That FAT32 partition got Win98 SE installed on it aokay. I got a nice boot manager utility but... when I try to unhide both the FAT32 and NTFS partition, PM gives me a warning that says something like the following: "Windows 98 SE doesn''t support multiple visibile primary drives. Unhiding both primary drives and booting into Windows 98 could result in data loss." I didn''t unhide the NTFS and boot into Win98 because I don''t want to risk Win98 doing something stupid like formatting my NTFS partition. That being said, what potential trouble am I looking at? Secondly, when I''m ready to throw a Linux partition into the mix, what do I need to do to ensure that Win98 doesn''t fudge with the Linux partition either? Thanks for you help! --Ben

Windows 98 can''t really deal with multiple primary partitions, because DOS couldn''t since 98 is based on DOS, it doesn''t work. You can get away with a multi-boot with all of those systems, it just takes not communicating between them, or creating a "secondary" fat32 partition that isn''t hidden, and all can access.For linux, just make sure that it installs correctly, partition magic should work with all three OSes properly.

Well, communication between them isn''t particularly necessary, so I''m not sweating that detail. But to clarify your response:

I''d make my Win98 partition a Logical drive instead of primary? Will still be bootable?

And should Linux be a Primary or a Logical drive?

Thanks again for your help!

--Ben

quote:Original post by benfinkel
Well, communication between them isn''t particularly necessary, so I''m not sweating that detail. But to clarify your response:

I''d make my Win98 partition a Logical drive instead of primary? Will still be bootable?

I think it should boot, however, you''ll have to use a bootmanager, as said....

quote:
And should Linux be a Primary or a Logical drive?

Linux really doesn''t care. LiLo (the boot-manager usually used with Linux) can take care of it all. Pretty good chance too that if you''re setting up your Linux-box, it''ll automatically configure both your windows-installations to boot with Lilo.

quote:Original post by NaliXL
Linux really doesn''t care. LiLo (the boot-manager usually used with Linux) can take care of it all. Pretty good chance too that if you''re setting up your Linux-box, it''ll automatically configure both your windows-installations to boot with Lilo.

And same if you use the grub bootloader which is becoming increasingly popular (I prefer it to Lilo).

Lilo..cool. I found a nice, free utility called Boot-US which seems to work very nicely, but if Lilo will handle it all I''m comfortable handing it off to Lilo.


Thanks for your help guys, I''ll post tomorrow to let you know how it went. Hopefully from the KDE browser.

--Ben

I know you may not have the money, but I found it much easier to install a new hard drive instead of splitting up the one I had. I started with 24GB, made it my secondary drive, bought a brand new 80GB for my primary, and installe XP on the primary and Mandrake on the secondary, with Grub as the bootloader. It works very nice, XP doesn''t even know Linux is there, I don''t have to worry about partition size, and it''s all cool in general.

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Capn,

No, I don''t have the money.. right now. I''m intending to do something along the lines of what you suggest, but in the meantime I want to play with all of these things and see what I can come up with.


Thanks for the idea,

Ben