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boot 98 from disk

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by griffen316

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ok heres the situation, my system currently has four hard drives, ones XP, ones Linux, ones storage, and the final one is in a hot swappable drive bay and has windows 98 installed on it(so its just like a regular hard drive in comp). bios order goes floppy, cdrom, windows XP hard drive. in order to boot to linux i throw in a floppy and since floopy boots first it reads directions off of floppy and the computer boots my linux hard drive instead of my windows XP hard drive. I want to be able to do the exact same thing with windows 98 (and potentially any hard drive with different OS that go into hot swappable drive, im going into forensics and need to use many OS). so my question is how can i create a boot disk for windows 98 that will boot the 98 hard drive when ever i throw in the 98 boot disk, as in i do not want to create a boot manager, so when the disk is thrown in at start up 98 boots up, when the disk is not in the system boots as normal. Thanks for any help

P.S. please no responses about altering bios so far thats the only response i get and according to some people what im requesting cant happen, even tho i currently have it working with linux

7 replies

by thechas

Well, the first issue is that you need to control the assigned drive letter for the swappable drive.
Registry entries are going to look for and use the drive letter that W98 was assigned when it was installed.
The good news here is that W98 might just ignore and skip over any drive formatted as a NTFS volume.

Anyhow, boot from a W98 boot or DOS floppy formatted on a W98 system.
Add or edit the Autoexec file on the floppy.
Set a path statement to include the bath to the Windows folder on the swap drive.
Execute the win (windows) command.

Alternately, I suggest you look into the Trios hard drive selector. This device allows you to select from installed hard drives to use as the "C:" drive.

Chas

by blackcurrant

Hi

Well, I've never tried this but...

As stated above you need to tell the system to start Windows using the Win command located in x:\windows

You will also need to set the path to the command interpreter otherwise the system will continually try to access the A:\ drive. This command is:

set comspec x:\command.com

As an aside, I do not know how old your computer is, but on mine (a Dell Optiplex GX270 less than a year old), there is a boot option during POST which allows me to boot from any drive I like. This is built into the BIOS.

Another option is to enter your BIOS and disable the other hard drives, forcing the machine to boot from your Win98 drive.

Good luck

by ants1976

I have set up WIN98 (Primary Drive) SUSE on Slave Drive.Boot up uses SUSE boot manager and allows for 3-choices.1-Linux,2-Linux Safe,3-Windows.I went in the Linux Desktop using KDE to alter the "SUSE boot up" sequence and made default "windows" startup FIRST.
regards

by tabcomputers2002

Here is an of the wall idea for you.

How about using the hot swap bay for your primary drive? Then you could put in the HD with the OS you need. My father inlaws system is set up like this so he can install the OS on a drive for any system he's working on.

by wlbowers

Your problem is that win98 has to be on the primary partition.

You can use Virtual PC from Microsoft.

It allows you to create virtual machines on a XP Pro base os.

With enough memory and separate drives per os you can run anything that a dos machine will allow and do it all at once.

Each "computer uses the resources from the hardware machine. You can even network and drive map between machines.

http://tinyurl.com/6twu3

Lee

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