Selecting Operating System

[Lloyd Plantholt]

I have 2 hard drives in my system.
1 Has Windows98 on it and
the other 1 has Windows XT Professional
My question is how can I switch between the Operating Systems at boot time or any other time??

I hope someone has a fix for this one....

Lloyd Plantholt

[Knuth Konrad]

Installing OSs so that they're multi bootable typically requires preparations/plannig done beforehand.

Especially (older) MS OS require the that the system partition is on the first (master) HD *and* within the first 8(?) GB of the HD.

Depending on how your system is configured (you haven't provided any information as to wich disk is the primary master, partitions of the disks, which OS sits where), you might not be able to configure your system to be dual bootable afterwards.

There are some free boot managers out there, most of them explain how HDs/OSs have to be setup in order to multi boot them. You might want to download one of them, but not actually use it, but have a look at the provided instructions/informations.

Perhaps you can rearrange your partitions with a tool like GParted, a free partition manager which boots from a CD. This program works great. It let's you move/resize/merge partitions without destroying data.

[Hans-Dieter Veit]

Depending on your mainboard's bios you may have an boot device select menu (often disabled in the BIOS-setting for some reason). It is reachable at some state of POST via an F-Key (often F12).

If this isn't available, you might set the boot order in your BIOS-settings. Quite unkomfortable if you must change often but you save the trouble with installing a bootmanager.

greatings
Hans

added:

if your XP uses the NTFS file system, your WIN98 isn't able to read the XP-disk

[Arthur Gomide]

I am using System Commander from V-COM

http://vcom.avanquest.com/cat/prod.php?pid=2824

[Buck Huffman]

a boot loader may help
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net
http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

Ranish Partition Manager has a boot loader. just hit enter to edit mbr
then space until boot loader. editing the menu is a little more complicated
but still pretty simple.
http://www.ranish.com/part

also windows 2000/XP and others? start with a boot loader than can be
set-up to boot just about any installed OS. You just have to edit boot.ini.
Can't remember where I saw the documentation on that. maybe a google
search will turn up something.

buck