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Dual Boot

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I have one hard drive with 98 second edition and a second hard drive with 2000 installed in the same PC. What is the procedure for moving the 2000 hard drive to a new PC and still be able to boot either the 98 or 2000 system? There is a boot.ini onboth drives. Can I just copy the boot.ini from the 98 drive to a new 98 drive on the new PC and be able to boot from either the 98 or 2000 system?

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by mckaytech

It depends on how closely the hardware correspnds between the two. Win2000 has some of the same sensitivities to hardware as NT and, in particular, if the motherboard chipset and IDE drivers are not very similar, it doesn't work to just move a drivefrom one system to another.

The boot.ini part of the plan sounds okay - the question is just whether the Win2000 is going to be okay with the new hardware.

paul

by dpreynolds

It worked when I first moved the drive then it quit working. I have not had time to investigate further.

by william jay

As enumerated in response #1, the NT Harware Abstraction Layer is particular about the machine configuration. To move the drive and OS easily, it must be nearly identical in components to work reliably after.
Also, if win98 is the only OS on the second machine now, copying boot.ini will only give notepad another file to edit. The bootloader files for NT will need to be installed too. Hopefully it can be accomplished with a bootdisk and a repair the NT session on the new machine, which will be easier if you prepare the disks before the move. Take a look at the first drive with both on, to see that bootsect.dos, ntlder.exe, ntdetect.com, and possibly others are there and are not found on a win98 only drive.
It will be infinitely easier and more reliable if you do a fresh install and migrate any user data and settings ... Two hours and done, rather than four or five or more and still trying ....

Hope this helps too ...

by computechie

I just wanted to say that Win2K isn't friendly when you take the HD it's on and move it to another computer. I had a machine running Win2K, and I moved the HD to another computer and it would get to the starting Windows 2000... and give a disk errormessage, and halt. Then I took it back to the original machine and it booted fine. It seems to grab a serial number or something (from the BIOS maybe?) and only want to boot with that specific config. This machine wasnt dual boot, and there was nothing special about it. Just my .02 but you might want to consider this in your transition.

by dpreynolds

I had a similar expericne. It worked for a while and then gave error messages. It is back on the original PC working fine.

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