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Dos/Win98 -NT4 Serv -2kServ Multi Boot

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by carol 1 view

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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?

5 replies

by carol

PS. MSDOS.SYS looks fine as well with the MultiBoot=1

Any suggestions as next course of action (other than reinstall, while I'm not afraid of re-installs, I'd prefer a better understanding of what has been changed, and what could be done to possibly account for the change.. even better) Good thing this is my system ;-)..

by msgtray

When NT installs (any flavor) it changes the MBR on your active partition. That is why MS recommends the specific order of installation for dual (or multi) boot systems. The good news is, it is very easy to fix.

You have described alot of information, but let me summarize to see if I have it right. At the present time you have a system that will boot into 98 but does not boot into NT (probably doesn't even show the multi-boot option).

This is the fix. Start the Win2k install. Select the repair option and only select the startup files. Install will restore the MBR to point to NTLDR. There is one point on which my memory is fuzzy. Win2k unlike NT4 has TWO instances of "Repair" during the install (when an existing Win2k is present on the drive). I can't remember if the option you want is on the first or second instance.

I am running a computer with Win98, NT 4 W/S, NT 4 Server, and Win2k Pro (for access to different OS's to investigate problems... and to see if it could be done...)

If you don't want to experiment with the repair, I can script the process on my machine.

Ray

by carol

Hi Ray,

Wanted to let you know this worked fine. My only adversity to the process is the length of time that you have to wait while the temp install files copy to the root, before the option to [R]epair comes up.

In fact I didn'teven have to run a repair oddly enough on the Win4.0 server install, I selected the option and it returned that it could not locate a 4.0 to repair... oddly enough however when I quit the install/upgrade/repair program at this point, my boot.ini wasback as a part of the boot process and I could access once again WinNT4.0. I would have to guess the install program returned it could not locate an NT install, because of course the NTFS had been upgraded (via 2k install). I had service pak 6.0 installed however, so my system was in-tact and operable.
Similar experience with Win2k.. although I'm thinking there could be an easier fix for the Win2k once NTloader was back in the picture... I'll read up. Many thanks.

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