RE: Set up DOS to dual boot WinXP

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=?Utf-8?B?SWFu?= <Ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:7E147B21-637B-4F01-B76C-6FC14FB7736D@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Actually, it 's much simpler than that, provided you can are using a
FAT32-aware DOS such as that from Win98.

Before installing XP,

XP is already installed, and has been for a long time.

...use FDISK to create a FAT32 partition to hold
both operating systems. Format it, then then do <sys c:> from the
floppy.

This will give you a basic bootable HD, which you can now test.

You'll propbably want to copy the other utilities from the floppy to a
suitable location perhaps C:\DOS, and adjust MSDOS.SYS so the boot
process points to this folder. (DOS without HIMEM.SYS is of very
little use!) Or, just put them into the root of C: in which case no
adjustments needed.

Now install XP, and opt _not_ to convert the partition to NTFS. The XP
bootloader should automatically create options for both OS's. It will
call the DOS option "Microsoft Windows" -because this version mostly
gets used to load Win9x. You can change this label in BOOT.INI if you
want.

Only proviso is that FAT32 partitions of over 128GB are very
inefficient in space usage (32GB is the max recommended size) so if
you have a large HD you may want to keep the sytem partition smallish
and use a separate NTFS data partition. (always a good practice
anyway, IMHO.) Once booted you can access the data in the NTFS
partition with NTFSDOS, BTW.



I thought about all of this, but I have had XP installed for a long
time.

David

.

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