OS installation

I'm not sure you can boot Win98 from anything but the C drive...

If I can not load 98 on the D drive and keep ME on the C drive, can I overlay ME with 98 or will I have to deinstall ME first and then load 98 on the C drive.

I would keep ME uninstalled. IMHO that is the worst OS Microsoft ever made...

I'll second that. 98 is far more reliable than Me. If you can't use 2000 or XP, I'd go with 98.

ME is an upgrade and I don't have which is on the machine now. It has fowled up. I want to upgrade to xp but I don't want to by the full version because I have 2 computers. But I also want to have 2 Os's so I don't have to update all my equipment. Thats why I would like to install 98 on the D drive and then get the Xp upgrade to overlay ME on the C drive. That way it would cost a lot less.

personally i wouldnt recormend installing XP on top of any other OS. a clean install is gives a much better installation, since you dont inherit all that old mess

normally a MS OS upgrade will install onto a blank partition, just to long as you can show to the installer that you have a suitable version of windows that you are eligable to upgrade from.

i *havent* tried this with XP, but it should work, IF the system is the same as it used to be:

format c:
format d:
install win98 onto c:
then install XP onto d:

XP at this point will configure the dual boot options for you.

since win98 is already installed, winXP should detect it quite happily, so it will know you are allowed to install it as an upgrade, but *should* still allow you to select a seperate drive as your place to install it.

the other point, i also am not sure that you can install win98 on drive D and have it boot.

if you use a boot manager this should be possible (partition magic used to include one), but without a boot manager i have no idea if the machine would boot after the installation.

personally i never tried it, so i really dont know.

if you try it, i would be interested in the result, just be prepared to have to reformat to get the machine booting if it all goes wrong

Thanks feline, but thats not much help. I didn't want to format the drives. I don't have the capacity to back up the drives. I was hoping that you had a miracle answer. Darn.

How about switching the boot-drives in the BIOS ? I used to do that when I installed a clean XP and wanted to keep my 2k to work on it until I was finished re-installing all the apps on XP. I disconnected the 2k drive first... And installed the new XP drive as C:

The big advantage is, that You can get rid of the old OS just by formatting or deleting the drive and don't have to edit the boot-manager AND both systems are on C: by default.

c242, I'll have to give that some thought. It might be over my head. I'll look into that. Thanks.

Couple of points...

If you use physical drives, not logical ones, you can put them into Drive caddies...and switch them round physically... without opening the box and wrestling with the ribbons, etc.

I do this...switching between 3 drives in 2 caddies....3 totally independent OS's.

Also, by default, I install 98 as a clean [no proggies, no driver disks, etc] install, then have its high mem manager enable the full install of XP over it....and there is no 'vestiges' of the old OS left...if you don't want them you have the option to delete them...