Dual Boot Question

I'm going to try to setup Win 98 and Wink 2k on one HDD in the morning. I was wondering if I have to install some drivers in both OS's seperately. Like my motherboard's 4-in-1's and raid drivers.... and my video card... and my monitor... do I have to install these twice, once for each OS? I know most hardware will automatically do it from the windows cd, but for the stuff that has its drivers on their own cd's....

Can I run different video card drivers on each OS... like 23.11 under win98 and 27.70 under win2k?

good question. I just did that [again] on my system, I have Windows 98 with the proper drivers to watch DVD's on, while I have Win 2K Pro with the W2K Drivers for gaming [since ATI, says "you don't need your DVD ROM if your using Win2K"]. I had to install my modem, and soundcard on both OS's. I have all my drivers on one CD-R, so it's not such a pain... good luck!

I would think yes. Cause each OS has it's own regestry. So I'd think everything would have to be installed seperately. And yes you should be able to run different drivers for your vid card.

Are you running seperate harddrives or all on the same drive?

bdf24 is right, drivers need to be installed in both OS's. also set up each on it's own partition and install win 98 before win 2k. if you set it up in this order, you will get a boot menu on startup that lest you select between 2k and 98.

I'm gonna reformat [again] in a few days, how do I set partitions on the harddrive?

if you already have 1 os set up and you don't want to reinstall it, you can use partition magic to resize the partition and create a new partition in the new empty space. if you are reformating, use fdisk, and delete the partition you have now, and create a partitoin for each OS.

bdf24 said:

Are you running seperate harddrives or all on the same drive?

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same drive, different partitions. I'll get a 2nd drive once my RMA is processed by Western Digital. I was going to make a small partition on the 2nd drive and put the 2 swap files there.

I use fdisk to set up partitions with win 98 & start-up disk, but any windows version should have its own way to make partitions. You'll have to format any partitons you make/change, and so you'll lose all the data on those partitions.

On my HDD I have a 2GB partition for Win98, a 6 GB partition for Win 2k and all my apps, and two 15GB partitions for games and media files respectively. Paritioning makes formatting quicker and easier without losing files on the other paritions, defragmenting faster, disk use more efficient with fat32 b/c of smaller clusters, OS performance better, etc. My second drive will have a 500 MB partition for the 1st drive's 2 swap files, and probably a lot of backed-up installers and drivers (although I have that stuff on a cdrw)... most of it will just be storage space for whatever.

You seem to know what you are talking about. You have really done your homework. I would not recoment however recomend having a seperate drive letter for the swap files. Just create swap files of fixed size on the partition that the OS is on. you then will not have to worry about fragmentation. Besides, if you have enough RAM like I do you don't even need a swap file.

swap

Tweak said:

You seem to know what you are talking about. You have really done your homework. I would not recoment however recomend having a seperate drive letter for the swap files. Just create swap files of fixed size on the partition that the OS is on. you then will not have to worry about fragmentation. Besides, if you have enough RAM like I do you don't even need a swap file.

Click to expand...

I was thinking it'd be better to have both of the swap files on the 1st partition of a 2nd hdd, plugging into its own ide channel. That way Windows could use the swap file at the same time it was accessing data from the main hdd. I always fix the size of virtual memory, since I don't have enough ram to disable it.

I have win 98 and win XP on the same drive (different partitions) and different drivers for my vid card... Cuz if u use the win 9x drivers in XP it probably wont work to well.....