A Real Boot Program (Other than Acronis OS Selector) & Dual boot problems w 98 & XP

[Aeridyne]

Been looking for a boot load program that actually allows you to boot multiple OSes without having all of the boot sector, boot files etc exactly how they would be normally to boot anyway.

For example I have tried lots of programs that were useless to me because all they do is execute the boot files that are already there (but they are messed up so it is just the same as not having it at all.) GAG, Smart Boot Manager, a few others... All they do is go to the boot.ini menu anyway, defeating the purpose and not giving me any way to boot 98.

I could get one, or the other to work, at different times manually, but I can't get both. XP is fairly easy to get to boot again by running the cd, recovery console and using bootcfg /scan and bootcfg /rebuild. I tried using various tools to generate a bootsec.dos file, but it fails and won't run, making it impossible for me to get 98 to boot as well as XP.

While it is possible that if I wiped out everything and installed 98 then XP from scratch it may work, I really would like to avoid doing that for fairly obvious reasons. Suppose I don't get why no one has ever written an actual program that will scan for operating systems, let you tell it what each is exactly and take care of tweaking/adding/removing whatever is necessary to actually get each to boot correctly.

Acronis OS Selector is the only piece of software I've found that claims to actually be able to do this. Which I supposedly own, however, I can't get the POS to work either because it stops me at adding a license key when I use the bootable media and won't accept any key I have for disk director, not 10, 11, or 12... Which makes no sense since I had 12 installed when I created that iso to burn the rescue media that has the option to load OS Selector and Disk Director 12 is the only Disk Director that was ever installed on the machine I used to create/burn the rescue media that has OS Selector available to use when it boots up on the cd.

So, I'm looking for something else, that can basically do the same thing, look at at least 2 OSes, fix the mbr, shuffle whatever files necessary and just make the darn thing work. I've been monkeying with this manual sh*t all day and have gotten nowhere.

Anyone know of anything?

 

[ninaholic37]

I have two partitions on my HDD:

1: NTFS - Windows XP
2: FAT32 - FreeDOS, MS-DOS 7.1, MS-DOS 8.0 (WinME), and a few Linux distros

Using Grub4DOS, it was pretty easy to get them all added to menu.lst. I haven't tried adding Windows 98 yet but I think it's essentially MS-DOS 7.1 with a GUI so I'm guessing it might work on Partition 2 as well. One snag I noticed is that MS-DOS 7.1/8.0 needed to be on a partition below the 8GB area on my hard drive, so I made the XP partition 6GB and put 7.1 right after for it to work, whereas FreeDOS could be anywhere (ie. at 99GB). Didn't really look into why though.

 

[vailr]

The easier method is to keep each O.S. on it's own physical hard drive, and use the system bios option key (usually F12, F11, or F10) to select which drive to boot from. During installation, disconnect all drives other than the drive being installed on.
Of course, if it's a laptop, then you probably would need to set up dual-boot on the laptop's single hard drive.

 

[Aeridyne]

Attempting to try that program now, installed in XP, not sure what to do with it now though really. However, starting to read up on this, I'm not sure it's going to work and be different from everything else I've tried.

" Grub4dos utilises two different methods for booting operating systems - both of which can be used via command line or configuration file entries. Both methods involve using the chainloader command, one to boot the device, the other to boot the operating system kernel or bootloader file(s). By chainloading the device Grub4dos can be used to boot unsupported partition types, as long as the operating system uses the MBR and/or partition boot sector as part of the bootstrap process. For chainloading devices refer to the following sections -

Chainload Master Boot Record (MBR)
Chainload Partition Boot Sector
Boot Floppy Disk (or disk image)
Boot CDROM

Directly chainloading OS files has an advantage over chainloading the device, as a partition or floppy (or partition/floppy image) with a corrupted boot sector can still be booted (as long as the filesystem remains correct).

Load Windows NT/2K/XP
Load Windows NT/2K/XP Recovery Console (cmdcons)
Load Windows Vista
Load Linux
Load Windows9x/ME/DOS/FreeDOS

NOTE - all of the following examples are configuration file entries, however they can easily be amended to run from the command line interface. To run from the command line omit the title command entry. After entering the last command you will also need to run the boot command (this is not needed in configuration file entries). The following menu.lst entry for example - "

It sounds like it also needs the files to actually be correct to work (which they are not, I have no bootsec.dos file, I don't know if the mbr is correct, etc. Right now everything works as if XP was the only OS installed. (I restored the mbr using Acronis after restoring a 98 install to another partition previously. 98 worked, it was the only thing that could boot though. I can make XP boot instead, but then I can't boot 98. Which is where I'm at now.)

My partitions are as follows;
1st - 10gb - Fat 32 - 98 - primary
2nd - 7gb - Fat 32 - storage archive - logical
3rd - 20gb - NTFS - XP - primary

They are physically in that order on the drive starting w 98

 

[Aeridyne]

The easier method is to keep each O.S. on it's own physical hard drive, and use the system bios option key (usually F12, F11, or F10) to select which drive to boot from. During installation, disconnect all drives other than the drive being installed on.
Of course, if it's a laptop, then you probably would need to set up dual-boot on the laptop's single hard drive.

That was what I was originally going to do, however, this machine is intended to be set up fairly idiot proof (including me I guess) and not require people monkeying around in the BIOS to boot one physical drive or the other. So I decided that wasn't going to be a good way to go, also I wanted it to all run from one drive rather than having to use 2. Another factor is I wanted this to be repeatable and be able to do it on other systems (I've been setting up quite a few 98 systems recently, this one I'm working on now already had a pristine install of XP and I hated to just, throw it away and install just 98 basically, 98 is great about letting you slap it onto a partition and redetecting everything, so I moved partitions around with Acronis disk director, plopped 98 on there from an image, got it all happy and the drivers all set, and proceeded to spend the entire day today figuring how to make them both boot!)

Anyway, I digress, yes, that is an option and would work (and I appreciate the input also), however I would like to use just one physical drive, and find something that makes fixing/booting multiple OSes as painless as that OS Selector is supposed to be essentially. Ideally...

 

[JackMDS]

Your story is a little unclear.

That said might be that this can help - https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

 

[Aeridyne]

Your story is a little unclear.

That said might be that this can help - https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

My apologies for lack of clarity, while I've drank a pot of coffee today, well anyway, I guess it only goes so far. Also I want to express my thanks for all the input so far, thanks everyone.

I realize being succinct and getting to the point while providing enough information is generally the idea, not always the best towards that I guess.

If there is any other information that would be helpful I can do my best to provide it. Suppose maybe if things are unclear I can try to resummarize a bit more Joe Friday style, just the facts...

Ok here goes;

The back story of the pc - Skip this paragraph if not interested, not entirely relevant to problem. So I have this old Gateway Pentium 4 that I bought from a guy, it was water damaged, corroded. I meticulously cleaned it and got it running again. Was very tempted to keep it because they are solid machines and I like that, even if it is pretty ancient and I already put a lot of time into making it work nice again.

The Machine itself - It is a Gateway 500SE Model El Paso 2 Intel motherboard. Intel 82801ba chipset. Creative CT4810 Vibra 128 sound card. ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra vid card. NEC USB 2.0 4 port pci card.

The OSes/Partitions - It was designed for XP and drivers exist, that was installed first and the rig was shelved for a while.
Decided I wanted to try and dual boot 98 on it as well and pulled it back out. I've been putting 98 on various other systems lately and had an image already of an Intel 82801ba based system (Dell GX150 I believe it was.) I then put in a 2nd hard drive. (The 2nd drive was meant to be temporary just to hold backups until it was done and a new full backup could be made to the primary drive's archive partition, which is the 2nd partition on the primary drive.) Put in a 2nd physical drive and made a backup of XP to that with Acronis, erased and re-laid out the partitions. I made the partitions as described above in that order while hooked up external to a Win7 machine on the original 40gb primary drive. (I might add that I could not manually get 98 to install on this system, upon loading the cd setup it stops right off the bat and asks for the cd saying it can't format one of the partitions for some reason before doing anything else immediately after either running setup manually from the cd, or selecting to run setup from the cd menu.)
I put 98 on the first partition, the 10gb one, using Acronis from a backup I had on a flash drive. At first it would not boot, I don't remember how I got it to. Finished setting up 98, got all the drivers right and made a new backup. Now I used Acronis to put XP back on, and put that on the 3rd partition. Of course, it was originally on the 1st partition of the drive, so it didn't boot at first, but that was easily fixed using XP's recovery console. And that brought me to the problem.

The problem -
I can only get one or the other OS to boot.
There is a file that needs to be created if I were to do it manually that does not exist, in an ideal world, XP makes this file when it it installed after 98 is installed when all the partitions are correct as well and everything is happy. It is bootsec.dos I believe. And it can only be created using manual methods that are a bit beyond my grasp honestly. Hence why my quest became, find something that can be used to look at these two OSes and say hey, it's alright, I got this... Preferably for free.

*In the meantime, I'll check out that EasyBCD as well. Hoping that it may work despite saying on the page there "EasyBCD can't fix a PC that won't boot". As for Grub4Dos, unfortunately I haven't made any progress with it, either I can't figure out how to use it effectively enough (which may potentially be the case as honestly I've really no idea what I'm doing with it, or it does need boot files to be correct first.)

 

[ninaholic37]

As for Grub4Dos, unfortunately I haven't made any progress with it, either I can't figure out how to use it effectively enough (which may potentially be the case as honestly I've really no idea what I'm doing with it, or it does need boot files to be correct first.)

What I did was I put slacko-5.7-NO-pae.iso on a USB stick using UNetBootin, then booted onto the usb, and then ran Grub4Dos from it's menu (it's included). It added two files in the root on my first HDD partition:

- grldr (the bootloader, starts when your computer boots)
- menu.lst (the menu options, can be opened in Linux as plain text)

This is what my entry for Windows XP looks like in menu.lst:

title Windows XP
errorcheck off
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /bootmgr
chainloader /bootmgr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /ntldr
chainloader /ntldr
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /io.sys
chainloader /io.sys
errorcheck on

So if either of those 3 exist (bootmgr, ntldr, io.sys), it boots using them. I have "ntldr" on my root so I think it finds that one first.

This is what my Linux entry looks like (for comparison):

title Tahr Puppy 6
uuid ####-####
kernel /tahr/vmlinuz pmedia=ataflash psubdir=tahr
initrd /tahr/initrd.gz

And my FreeDOS entry:

title FreeDos
root (hd0,1)
chainloader /fdos/kernel.sys
boot

The uuid and root(hd0,1) lines are just two ways to point to my second partition. My guess is that the Windows 98 one would look like the FreeDos or XP one but find io.sys (maybe). Grub4Dos might find all your OSes and do the the work for you (it did it for me with XP and Linux, I installed the Dos files and entries later).

There's probably a lot of different ways to do the same thing, that's just what I did.

 

[TheELF]

For grub4dos look in the directory called sample it contains a file called menu.lst which already is set up for all versions of windows

 

[corkyg]

I use a hardware approach. I keep different OS's on separate drives, and simply insert the one I want into a EZ-Swap mobile rack. No dealing with BIOS or software. Really simple.

 

[ninaholic37]

I reduced my XP entry to one line. A menu.lst like this might work for your setup:

title Windows XP
root(hd0,2)
chainloader /ntldr

title Windows 98
root(hd0,0)
chainloader /io.sys
boot

It might boot into MS-DOS and you'll have to type cd/windows and win or manually (or add it to AUTOEXEC.BAT) or "exit". but I'm not sure about that either. Looking forward to hearing your results if you get Grub4Dos working Aeridyne.

 

[ninaholic37]

I was thinking about this a bit more, and a light bulb suddenly went off:

Since you have XP on the 3rd partition, then when your XP boots up, your two FAT32 partitions will take drive C and D, and the NTFS would take E (or F: if you have a CD drive) I think... and XP probably looks for all it's files in drive C, which would (incorrectly) be the FAT32 partition.

MS-DOS 7.1 / Windows 98 on the other hand, doesn't even seem to know what NTFS is, so if you're lucky (like I was only when I made my NTFS partition <= 7GB) then it will just skip NTFS to the first FAT32 partition and (correctly) make it drive C, and NTFS will be on drive C too (for booting XP) since it's on the first partition.

But I can think of 4 ways around your snag (maybe...) so far:

1. Add a line to menu.lst for XP that virtually switches partition 1 and 3 (map?)
2. Add a line to menu.lst for XP that virtually hides partition 1 and 2 (hide?)
3. Change your order to something closer to mine
4. Redirect/hack Windows XP itself to find it's own files on drive E/F/3rd partition

#2 seems the easiest I think:

title Windows XP
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,1)
root(hd0,2)
chainloader /ntldr

This, might be a better idea, for my DOS partitions too, than cramming them all onto the same partition... if it works as described... hmmm :hmm: :biggrin:


edit: Haha, success! But the flag is permanent so you have to restore it after:

title Windows 98
unhide (hd0,0)
unhide (hd0,1)
root(hd0,0)
chainloader /io.sys
boot

 

[Aeridyne]

I have a little bit of an update, I'll try to get back here to post some more info later.