I know this is pushing things to the limit, but I’m sure there are peers out there who are supporting Sever / Instruction environments, which require running several OS’es.
The situation is everything has been running fine. We installed in order: Dos 6, Win98 (both in first partition with FAT 16), WinNT Server 4 into unallocated space (partitioned & formatted NTFS), Win2k Server into unallocated space (partitioned & formatted with NTFS.
Well I’d found we had a student who had as yet not installed Win 98 on his station. His station meanwhile had now received WinNT 4 Server, and Win2k Sever installs.
So today I took a portable drive placed it into my own station to see, how installing Win 98, after the servers, might affect our multi-boot process.
The good news is, I successfully installed Win98 to the portable, after NT was installed to it’s second partition and multi-booted between the systems fine. At this point I decided we were prepared to deal with Win98 reinstalls (which may arise) and have this fella to install ’98 to his C: drive. I removed the portable, and powered the system up to my usual harddrive…. and this is where I’m stymied.
My stationary harddrive lost it’s booting OS. This stationary harddrive is Mastered on the second controller. The C: drive was effectively the D: drive while the portable drive was running. I am certain I made no intentional changes to this drive. *however* what might have happened during the Win NT 4.0/Win98 installs to the portable drive?
This partition is “active”, I’ve sys’ed the C: (Dos 6.0), I’ve checked and re-checked the boot.ini file, which is pointing to the correct partitions for the respective installs, I’ve made certain ntloader and ntdetect are residing on C… have I missed something?