Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

partitioning a hard drive for 3OSes

0 helpful
11 replies

by ldavid

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Here's the deal. I have a 20G hard drive and I need to load 3 OSes on it, but NT4.0 keeps hosing anything I try by saying, the partition is to big or I have to make 2G partitions all the around, which defeats the purpose of utilize all 20Gs on the HD. I already have a 3G hard drive that has Win98 on it and I can get by with just putting NT and Win2k on the 20G as a slave if I will still be able to dual boot to all 3 OSes having 2 hard
drives. Is this possible and if so, how?
I've been successful with installing Win98 and Win2k on the same drive, because they both read FAT32. What gets me, is how to partition the HD. I've tried both FATs, I've tried installing 98
first then NT and visa versa, I've tried only partitioning/formating thec drive and letting NT do the rest and I've tried partitioning/formating the whole HD i.e. extended and logical to no avail.

Can anyone possible shed some light on this?...

Thnx!

Lori David
FAST Software
Network Department
502-254-3278 X:220

11 replies

by dmiles

Take in consideration that the BIOS may need to be updated.

In partitioning the drive,donot enable large disk support using fdisk,this will automatically enable fat32 on the driveYou need to partition the drive using FAT.

You will be able to have a dual boot of the OS,when using two hard drives

When installing NT,download the latest ATAPI update and also you want to have at least service pack 3 to load nt onto the hard drive

by abohart

The best way that I have found of doing this is by using System Commander. While there are ways of doing this with NT 4 boot manager and other boot managers out there, they are problematic at best, and a nightmare to set up. System Commander has themost elegant solution.

by dion1

Partition Magic 7.0 will create, resize, merge or copy partitions with out destroying data, also support fat, fat32, ntfs and linux. Partition Magic can convert from fat to ntfs or fat32 to ntfs. I used it and it works great.

This discussion is closed to new replies.