P4C800-E Deluxe & Multipule W2K OS partitions, problems installing to 2nd & 3rd partitions?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tim
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T

Tim

Hi there,

Trying without success to install W2K on 3 Primary partitions on a SATA
drive connected to the Promise Raid controller which is set to IDE. No
other drives apart from a DVD drive connected to IDE 1.

I can install W2K to the first Primary partition installing the Promise
drivers from the F6 command and all goes well the OS loads.

Then use Partition Magic 8 to set the 2nd hidden partition to Active and
hide the other 2 Primary partitions. Again I can start the load of W2K and
install the Promise driver at the F6 command and then begin the install of
the OS but on the first re-boot the system says 'missing operating system'?

I have the BIOS set in Enhanced Mode with SATA and the Promise controller is
enabled and in IDE mode.

Any thoughts or ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

Many thanks, Tim.
 
Tim said:
Hi there,

Trying without success to install W2K on 3 Primary partitions on a SATA
drive connected to the Promise Raid controller which is set to IDE. No
other drives apart from a DVD drive connected to IDE 1.

I can install W2K to the first Primary partition installing the Promise
drivers from the F6 command and all goes well the OS loads.

Then use Partition Magic 8 to set the 2nd hidden partition to Active and
hide the other 2 Primary partitions. Again I can start the load of W2K and
install the Promise driver at the F6 command and then begin the install of
the OS but on the first re-boot the system says 'missing operating system'?
Click to expand...

I don't think Windows will like this approach of messing around with
partition status. Better to just activate all 3 partitions and install
one copy of Windows on each, that should set up a multiboot menu.
 
Hi there,

I particularly want 3 separate partitions.

Partition 1 W2K-SP4 partition 2 W2K and partition 3 XP-SP2 once I've managed
to load all three partitions I then use Boot Magic to control the opening of
any individual partition.

There must be away of doing this but how?

Many thanks for your pointer, Tim.
 
What you're trying to do will work, I have a similar setup here, even
with Boot Magic running (even though my OS's are all NTFS-based).

I bet that Windows is looking at the wrong partition after the reboot.
In boot.ini there is a reference to where the OS is. After installing
Win2K and getting to the reboot, you need to edit the boot.ini entry
for the OS - the partition number is wrong, as it will probably point
to partition(1) where it should be (2). This will happen with your
third install as well.

Because editing boot.ini of Win2K before it runs involves using the
Rescue console etc. and is a hassle, I found it easier to just install
one Win2K partition first, then from Windows add 2 extra lines to the
boot.ini to point to partitions 2 and 3 (do this in system control
panel), and then simply copy the whole partition to the other
partitions on the disk. With PartitionMagic, this is easy.

After you have the partitions working, you delete the extra boot.ini
lines for the entries you don't need and voila, 3 separate partitions
that do not know about the others' existence.

Good luck,
Freez
 
Have you considered virtual PC or VMWare? You can then run all OS at the
same time as needed - RAM being the limiting factor. VPC costs less than a
200GB disc drive... You still need a s/w license for each install.

I use such setups for s/w testing and have win95a, OSR2, Win98, NT4, W2k Pro
& Server, and so on running on an XP SP2 desktop.

Many help desk setups use VPC / VMWare so they can see exactly what the
customer is talking about.

There are trial downloads for both available...

HTH
 
Hi there,

I managed on the 3rd try to get it to work by installing W2K-SP4 on
Partition 1, XP on Partition 2 and W2K on Partition 3 I knew about the
boot.ini file but of course forgot about it and using PM I could have
unhidden the Partitions on altered the file but as I say I succeeded
eventually by just setting a Partition to active hiding the other Partitions
and installing the OS.

Again many many thanks for everyone's help, Tim.
 
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