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Please help with my Dual Boot setup

837 views 10 replies 5 participants last post by  Odysseus 
#1 ·
Hi all!!

I currently am running a dual boot system with XP and 98SE. I have two hard drives, a 40G and a 120G. The 40 G is partitioned into two 20G sections.

The layout is as follows:

C: - 20 G partition of 40G drive - Win 98SE
D: - 120 G drive - Win XP
E: - 20G partition of 40G drive

All drives are FAT 32

I would like to upgrade the 98SE to ME, but I REALLY do not want to have to reformat the 120G drive. I have a LOT of stuff on there!

I tried to format the C drive but to no avail. XP would not let me format either C or E drive, and when I boot by floppy the only drives that DOS can see is the E drive which it designates as C.

I used windows explorer to delete the contents of C and E drive, but Windows ME says that C drive is an invalid file format and will not allow me to install.

How can I format C drive and install Windows ME without having to reformat my 120 G drive?

Any help is greatly appreciated! :)

Regards,

Darren.
 
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#2 ·
I was thinking......

how can I get all of my drives visable in DOS. Wouldn;t that do it?

That way I could erase the partition on my smaller drive and keep it as the C drive and install ME on it, and the 120 gig can stay as D drive with XP.

Plausable?
 
#3 ·
perhaps someone more eloquent can explaint this... but dude you've got some funky things in your post.

OK, first off, why do youhave your 40 GB partitioned as C: and E:? Why did you skip the D? It may be a small thing but when you're dual-booting like this, it makes it much easier to keep track of what you have on each partition.

2nd. When you say "....XP would not let me format either..." What do you mean by that? Are you syaing you tried to boot up w/ XP Boot diskettes? Are you saying you used a DOS command? Please clear that up for us.
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originally posted by Oddysseus:

I tried to format the C drive but to no avail. XP would not let me format either C or E drive, and when I boot by floppy the only drives that DOS can see is the E drive which it designates as C.


I could be wrong about this, but waht you see there is really the C: partition. If C: is really your primary partition, then yes that's what it's supposed to see, not your E drive... so yes it's correctly reporting as C:
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originally posted by Oddysseus:

I used windows explorer to delete the contents of C and E drive, but Windows ME says that C drive is an invalid file format and will not allow me to install.


Well yes, that's cuz you no longer have the essential boot files such as io.sys and msdos.sys sitting on your HDD. You said you deleted everything off your C: drive using Win explorer didn't you?
____________________________

Even more confusing is that you say you don't want to format your HDD, but in your explanation you say that you tried to format your C: partition. I hope you realize if you format it, you WILL lose all data on that drive - right? So if you want to upgrade your OS w/out losing your data, the best choice would be to simply get a Win98 SE UPGRADE disk rather than a full OS CD.

But that's a moot point now as you've already wiped out all the files sitting on your C: partition (which was a dumb move) cuz now you're gonna need a full OS CD. The proper way would have been to boot up w/ Win98 or Win ME diskettes and then type /fdisk at the command prompt. You can then use fdisk to format any partition(s) you want.

Furthermore, in order for better assistance please explain your current partition scheme layout. i.e. if your C: partition is your Primary, what is your logical and extended...etc. What i think is going on (just my guess) is that your C: is primary but your XP partition (drive ltr E: ) is designated as logical - right?

As a side note, for future reference, with a 120 GB HDD, i would most certainly make that all 1 single partition using NTFS. Since you've got Win XP loaded on that monster, NTFS would have been the best option for you as you would not have had to worry about cluster size being an issue. However since you've made it FAT32, you're gonna run into some serious HDD slack. To reduce the slack, I recommend that you make your patitions no larger than 8 GB each.

Edit: Darren, i just re-read this msg and although i don't mean to sound critical i may have come across that way. You're not the only one that was made a dumb move w/ a PC and I certainly cannot brag either. My comment above was just my late night sense of humor. Please excuse me if i offended you.
 
#4 ·
Hi,

If you format your c drive you may loose your boot.ini file needed to boot xp.

Instead of installing ME as a clean install, you can choose to upgrade instead.

Note: I would leave 98Se alone, ME is nothing but trouble.

Paul
 
#5 ·
I go with Paul on this point, ME is NOT an upgrade to W98SE, it's a step backwards! I really can't imagine why anyone would use ME willingly. :rolleyes:
 
#6 ·
Thanks for the reply's guys!

I know ME is a step back - let's just say that I have my reasons and I am not totally happy about it.

The labeling of C,D and E was NOT done by me. I originally had the 40G drive partioned as C and D. When I later installed the 120G drive WINDOWS decided in all its wisdom to call that drive D and make my secondary partition on my 40G drive E.

So......when I said that DOS sees my E drive and calls it C, I meant that it only sees the secondary partition on the 40G drive and calls it C drive. When I had the operating system on C drive I could not access it to format it, hence my dilemma.

I know that deleting all of the files why dumb. Why did I do it? Out of frustration I suppose.

I do not want to format my 120 G HDD (which now has XP on it), and I WANT to format the 40G HD, which has nothing on it at this point.

So C drive is blank and is the primary partition of the 40G drive.

D drive is the 120G drive (formatted in FAT32 so I can drag and drop between drives)

E drive is the secondary partition of the 40G drive and is blank.

I hope that makes my problem a little clearer, and again thanks very much for the replies.

BTW - I take no offence to contrustive criticism. :)
 
#7 ·
The drive letters are assigned as follows; C is the first partition of the primary disk, D would be the primary partition of the second hd. Any extended partitions / logical drives will follow in order from the primary hd then the secondary hd. This is standard on a win9x system the only way the new hd would be E instead of D would be if you just created an extended partition and no primary partition. Ok enough with the explanation your problem is not that hard to fix.
Disconnect your secondary hd; install ME after a format. When your ME install is up and running shut down the computer and reconnect the secondary hd. Now boot with the xp cd; choose repair consol at the command line type fixboot. That should fix the boot.ini file and allow you to dual boot again. Note: you can also do a repair installation of xp and that will fix the problem also. With the repair install you will probably have to reinstall your programs; however data will still be there.
 
#8 ·
Originally posted by crjdriver:
...boot with the xp cd; choose repair consol at the command line type fixboot. That should fix the boot.ini file and allow you to dual boot again.
i'm not familiar enough with Win XP to say for sure on this, but I'm not sure that will work. With my dual boot (W2K & Win98) the only way i could get my dual-boot menu back was to use the ERD (emergency repair disk) and verify system files (option 2 under the recovery console).

Odysseus, if cjdriver's instructions work for you, lemme know - just so i know for future reference. Thanks.
 
#11 ·
WOHOO!!!!

FIXED!!

Thanks to ALL who helped. :)

So.....this is what I did.

After I had deleted all of the files on the C drive with Windows explorer (do NOT do this BTW:rolleyes: ) I used F disk to repartition my 40G hard drive into two 20G sections. I then did a clean install of Windows ME.

So.......that was all fine and good, but ME did not see my 120G HDD and I could not figure out why. I also tried BOOTFIX to no avail.

I tried playing with BOOT.INI and got errors saying I was missing NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM. I used DOS to copy those files from my XP CD to C drive. The system would still not reboot in XP.

I tried a repair install and then ran Bootcfg /rebuild in the XP repair consule. No luck, and I then started to receive the error 0X0000007B saying that my system was in danger of real damage.

ANYWAYS, here is what I found out. When I used Fdisk I erased EZ-BIOS off of my 40G drive, even though my utilities disk said it was there. So I uninstalled and then reinstalled EZ-BIOS on both drives and VOILA! Sucess!! XP then finished loading and I am not posting here again.

Once again, thanks to all who took the time to help. I hope that I can someday reciprocate.

Regards,

Darren.
 
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