I have 2 hard drives in my pc. One is xp pro, the other win 98.
I just switch ribbons & reboot to a HD. Both set on cable select. I would like to have them perminantly hooked up and when I start my pc, have a choice of which HD to boot into.Can anyone tell me how. I have no idea.

It can be done, but exact "how" of it depends on a couple of things:

Have both drives always been installed in the computer? If so, and you installed XP on the secondary drive while 98 was present on the primary drive, you might be most of the way there. If not, you can still do it, but it will just take a bit more configuration work.

XP was loaded first. I then unplugged it and loaded WIN 98 an a 20 gig HD.
I just plug and unplug them as necessary. Maybe in this case they are both primaries.
XP just won't support some of the games my son and I like to play.
I await instructions from the pro's

In a dual drive or dual partition boot scenario with XP and an older version of Windows, the usual method is to install the older Windows on the first partition/drive and to then install XP on the second. That way, XP would automatically detect the existing Windows installation and configure the dual booting for you automatically.

Since each operating system was installed independently of the other in your case, XP is unaware of the 98 installation. This means that you'll have to do some manual configuration in order to have XP's boot loader give you the option of booting either OS.

The following is probably the easiest method, as it only requires adding one entry to the existing XP bootloader configuration file. If it doesn't work there are other ways to make it happen, but try this first:

1. Make the Windows XP drive the Primary Master drive (C:), and make the 98 drive the Primary Slave (D:). I would suggest not using Cable Select, but instead hard-setting the Master/Slave jumpers on each drive to their appropriate positions. Double-check your jumper settings and cable connections before you proceed.


2. Boot the computer; it should boot directly into XP.


3. The file you need to edit is C:\boot.ini, which is a hidden system file. In order to see the file and edit it:

- Open Windows Explorer, and in the Folder Options->View settings under the Tools menu, select "show hidden files and folders", and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" and "Hide extentions for known file types".

- Locate boot.ini in your C:\ directory and double-click on it; that should open the file in Windows Notepad. The contents of the file will look very similar to:



4. Edit the file by adding the entry "D:\="Windows 98" after the last existing line. The file will now look like:



5. Save the file and reboot. On reboot, you should be presented with a menu where you can choose which version of Windows to boot into.

-> Note that you might want to increase the "timeout=" value in boot.ini. That entry tells the XP how long (in seconds) to display the boot menu before automatically booting into the OS specified in the "default=" line. The default value is only 3 or 5 seconds, so if you want to boot into 98 but take your attention away from the computer at that point, you'll miss your window of opportunity and the computer happily continue to boot into XP.


Give the above a try and let us know the results.

Have you also considered running the games in XP in 98 mode? Right click the program and then click the properties, under compatibility you can select Windows 95, Windows 98 and others.

Chester

Thank you all. Chester, your recomendation worked fine.
DMR, I would still like to hook both drives up. I unhid every folder and file and did several searches for boot.ini and found no results. I am running xp pro, not xp home if that makes a difference. Anything from this point on would be just for fun on my part.
I do appreciate everyones time and knowledge.

That can definitely work with some older applications. It may not though, depending on the specific games in question, as "compatibilty mode" isn't the same as running the programs in the true native environment they were designed to run under. Worth a try maybe, I suppose.

That's weird. From what you've said so far, XP Pro was installed when there were no other drives/partitions/operating systems present. If that's really the case, boot.ini should be in your root (C:\) directory, along with the other XP boot files such as ntldr, bootsect.dos, ntdetect, etc.

DRM, The boot.ini file was in the root dir. I'm not only blind, I also can't see.
I am going to follow your instr. and see if I can make it work. My win 98 hard drive
has a duel slave not a master slave. I will set it on dual s. Would the cd rom be set
as a master on it's own ribben. Master and slave HD s. set on ide 1 cd rom on 2

I don't understand what you're trying to say there; there's no such thing as "dual slave" or "master slave". Do you mean Secondary Slave as opposed to Primary Slave, perhaps?


Yup- exactly.