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95B & NT Can I?
I'll post here first but maybe somewhere else would be better, who knows.
I have a machine with one, 8GB FAT32 drive (Primary Master with a CD-ROM as Primary Slave) and Win95B installed, running smoothly, and a second 1.6 GB drive FAT (Secondary Master) that I'd like to put WinNT 4.0 on and dual boot.
I had this setup before (95 & NT) on one drive using a 1600 MB FAT for the 2 OS's to load from. I need it on completely separate drives though and can't figure why, even though the "D" drive is formatted FAT and clean, I can't get the NT install past the point of telling me that the drive partition "D" won't allow for the install. I tried it as NTFS too but really would rather have it as a standard FAT partition.
Has anyone out there tried, or has running, a dual boot with two entirely separate drives on the same machine? Is it even possible? I tried all manner of searches and nothing says "Yes, you can use 2 separate drives."
"C" FAT32 Primary / Active
"D" FAT Primary / Active
I've set them up this way with Partition Magic, Ver 6.0 and when, after numerous attempts, couldn't get it to install used FDISK and FORMAT to try it and still got the same message at the "Install to What Partition" point, highlight it, press enter and the partitions not recognized as a proper blah blah blah.
Thanks, even if the news is that I can't do what I want at least I'll know.
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"Finest Kind"
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I would:
Pull out the Windows 95B drive and make the
NT drive Secondary Master.
Install Windows NT
Put the Windows 95B drive back in.
You know have to HDs in your comp. that are bootable. From BIOS you can change the boot sequence which gives you the option to either boot from Primary Master (Win95) and Secondary Master (WInNT).
A boot menu is very hard to get on your specific configuration. You can if you do want to gamble but why really? BIOS is a good bootmanager. :-)
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AMD650 Mhz, K7V, 384Mb RAM, Matrox Millenium G400 32Mb, SBLive!, 3Com 3C905C
Windows 95a + Windows XP Pro
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yes you definitely can install NT on a seperate drive. You can install it on any drive you want as long as the system partition or drive is formatted with a file system that NT recognizes, FAT or NTFS. If you're running 95B on a FAT32 drive, NT can't see it and can't install the files it needs to boot. If yoiu want to do what you are trying to I think you would first have to FDISK, making sure not to enable large disk support, and reinstall 95 onto a FAT16 drive, Then you can install NT on that second drive of yours.
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Thanks, but I really need the OS's separate and I think I can do this with Boot Magic or XOLS and the setup I have. I guess I just need to pull the Primary Master, current "C", and make the Secondary Master the Primary Master until NT is loaded and then use Boot Magic to switch back and forth.
In theory it should work, right??
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"Finest Kind"
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Sure. You can use the bootmanager but you can choose which OS to boot from within BIOS to save money and effort.
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AMD650 Mhz, K7V, 384Mb RAM, Matrox Millenium G400 32Mb, SBLive!, 3Com 3C905C
Windows 95a + Windows XP Pro
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OK, here it is. This worked for me, it may not be necessary for others, but this is actually very simple.
I tried and tried to make a suggested setup work but with every attempt I could not get the NT install past recognizing the original "C" drive. No matter what settings I used, and believe me I tried everything possible in both Partition Magic and Boot Magic, still at every completion of the install disks I would receive:
"8057 MB Disk at 0 on Bus 0 on ATAPI does not contain a partition suitable for starting WindowsNT."
This setup would always lead back to both drives shown this way:
C:FAT32 BOOT at 0 on bus 0 on atapi (8 gig drive Win95b)
D:FAT NT BOOT at 0 on bus 0 on atapi (1.6 gig drive WinNT)
Finally I knew I'd never be able to "hide" the original "C" from the install so I pulled the Primary ribbon from the MOBO and left it hanging and pulled the Secondary ribbon from the MOBO and plugged that into the Primary connector on the MOBO. In effect I instantly made the blank formatted "D" > "C" with the CD-ROM instantly becoming the Primary Slave. It had been the Secondary Slave.
With this setup I was able to install the NT OS on that clean drive, 1st attempt. Once I was up and running (replacing ribbons to original locations) I tried to get Boot Magic to recognize two completely separate drives. With no boot section on the Win95 drive for both OS's (FAT) it could not do it. After many attempts using every possible combination of "Hide, Unhide, Active", etc., I gave up and uninstalled Boot Magic and went back to my freebie, XOSL which has the added feature to "Swap drives".
It worked first time out and I now have 2 completely isolated OS's on two completely isolated drives in one machine. All that's left is to is get WinNT to recognize my modem and NIC and I'm done. Obviously with this setup one drive is always hidden so they will not share info, Drive to Drive, but that's what I wanted. They will both be able to share with my other machine though which I do want.
It was a hell of an experience and now that I know (at least for me) that it requires a single Primary Master Drive for each OS install it will be easy in the future should I want to do it again.
Thanks all for your suggestions.
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"Don't know where I'm goin but there's no sense being late"
