Re: (Dual-boot) Partition won't stay formatted

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"Jim" <null@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Sam" <no@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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I have a win98\xp setup, both on different drives. XP has two
partitions -
ntfs\fat32. It's the fat32 I'm having trouble with, it won't stay
formatted.
If I use xp, 98 wants to format it. If I use 98 then they both want to
format it after re-boot. I want to setup a third OS. I can't use the 98
drive because it's too small for another partition and I rather not swap
the
OS's. Is there a way to make this work?

Thanks
Sam



I have a suspicion what the problem is, but it's way too complicated to
detail here. What I would suggest, however, is that you keep ALL OSes on
the first HD (as primary partitions), and any shared DATA (which I assume
the FAT32 partition is) on the second HD as one or more volumes in an
extended partition.

HD0/Part0: Win98
HD0/Part1: XP
HD1/Part0: Extended
HD1/Part0/Vol1: DATA

I'd be willing to bet if you did this, your problems would disappear.
Again, a bit to complicated to detail here, but the issue has to do w/ the
way the system makes drive letter assignments, esp. w/ the older Win98 OS.
What I've described above is the BEST way to avoid several problems that
can
arise when configuring multiple HDs for multiple OSes and shared DATA.

Jim


I thought about doing that but I didn't want to do all of that work if I
didn't have to. You mentioned drive letter assignments... do you mean the
reason it is an issue because the OS's might see the partition with
different drive letters? Like win98 sees it as Drive D and XP as Drive E? If
that's the case, are you saying if I manually change the drive letters to
match so both OS's see it as the same letter my problem will go away?


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