Dual boot with win98SE not working

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Guest

Hi,
Trying to do fresh installs of 98 and w2k on separate partitions of 80gb drive.
Partitions as follows:
C: - 200 mb for boot files only - FAT formatted - Active partition
D: - 10 gb for W2K - unformatted at first
- 15 gb unformatted (to add Free BSD later)
E: - 50+ gb (rest of disk) for win98se - FAT32 formatted

I install win98se onto E: with no problem. Starts fine. I then installed W2K with no
problem. Both W2K & 98 would boot. Tried to install W2K recovery console option.
Seemed to work. Had W2K, Win98, and (W2K) recovery console as choices in boot.ini
But Win98 won't boot. Getting the errors:

The following file is missing or corrupted: E:\Windows\HIMEM.sys
The following file is missing or corrupted: E:\Windows\DBLBUFF.sys
The following file is missing or corrupted: E:\Windows\IFSHLP.sys
C:>
C:> cannot find win.com, unable to continue loading windows
C:>

Thought maybe installing recovery option was too much for windows to handle,
so erased complete drive (wrote zeros), repartioned, reformatted, and reinstalled
both OS'S. Now 98 won't load after W2K install (same errors even without recovery
console installed).

Any clues as to how to get MS software to work with itself?
 
You might have better luck in a win9x group, but installing win9x 25 gB from
the start of the disk and on a 50 gB partition are more than likely the
problem.
 
Compare real W98 boot directory with the one from msdos.sys. I hope both D:
and E: are primary partitions.
 
John said:
Hi,
Trying to do fresh installs of 98 and w2k on separate partitions of 80gb drive.
Partitions as follows:
C: - 200 mb for boot files only - FAT formatted - Active partition
D: - 10 gb for W2K - unformatted at first
- 15 gb unformatted (to add Free BSD later)
E: - 50+ gb (rest of disk) for win98se - FAT32 formatted
Click to expand...

This won't do. If C is primary and the rest are volumes in an extended
partition, the other OSs will be installed with an undefined procedure. You
can't use a Win9x partitioning utility to create additional primary
partitions, but W2K's setup can.

That's without mentioning drive sequence changing depending on whether a
partition is readable or not by an given OS. You might consider formatting C
and D as FAT and FAT32 (primary /extended). Then adding W2K, which can read
FAT,FAT32 and NTFS as the next drive in the sequence (primary).
 
I have Win98 installed on C first( 8 gig), W2K second
on E: (20 Gig) and they work fine, though I hardly ever
boot W98. D: (2 Gig) is a dedicated swap, and there's
about 80 more gigs for data storage.
 
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