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NT Workstation 4.0/Win2K Pro dual boot

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by tech84 1 view

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This is odd... I've got NT W/S installed on my laptop in the first two partitions. I have 8GB of free space, and want to install Win2K Pro in a third partition. Any method I use to install it, either booting from the CD or starting the install from within NT W/S, as soon as the machine reboots, I am no longer able to boot into NT W/S. When I select NT W/S at the boot menu, it looks good all the way through kernel initialization. The blue screen comes and goes, but when I get to the boot screen, the background and bitmap are there, and I can move the mouse around, but there's no logon banner. I can get no further from here without powering down. I tried a repair with the NT W/S CD, and it told me that the operating system had been altered by a newer version, and labels the installation unrepairable. How could that be?! I would think that the only system files that changed would be boot.ini, NTLDR, and maybe ntoskrnl.exe. Is this true? I've installed Win2K Pro RC2 on a box running NT W/S at home several times w/o any problems. It dual boots just fine. Is there something different with the OEM version of Win2K Pro? Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

3 replies

by michelm

Well I cannot you give you a 100% diagnosis but what you might consider is the following:

Win2k also changes the NTFS filestructure that is given by NT. So one thing you should have to have is SP4 or better SP6 applied to NT.

I am not sure if the bootloader os NT and Win2k is compatible.

If you want to dualboot the both OS I recommend to configure the third partition as a (second) primary partition and install Win2k into this partition.
To achieve this you need either a partitioning tool like PartitionMagic from Powerquest or you get the Linux FDISK.
Microsoft's fdisk is not able to do it.

cheers Michel

by tech84

Good points. I do have SP6a on the NT install. I also think you're correct on the bootloader incompatibility. It turns out that the files causing the problem are NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM. I got the dual boot to "work" by creating a folder in the root called Admin with two subfolders: NT4 and WIN2K. In the NT4 folder are the two above-mentioned files that are applicable to NT4, and in the WIN2K folder are it's two files. I also created two small batch files. One file xcopies the two NT files into the root, overwriting the existing files, and the other batch file does the same for the WIN2K files. So when I'm running NT, and want to reboot into Win2K, I run the Win2K batch file. Likewise, when I'm running Win2K and I want to rebootinto NT4, I run the NT4 batch file. This is clunky, but it works. Also, Win2K doesn't release the PCCard properly. I have to power down the laptop when changing from Win2K to NT4, otherwise it will not initialize when I boot into NT4. So this iswhere I am now. I'm going to apply SP1 on Win2K tonight and see if that makes a noticeable difference.

Oh, you're right about the partitions also. Out of the two partitions I'm using for NT4, the second is an extended partition with one logical drive. So Win2K is actually on the second primary partition.

Thanks for your input!

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