Hi,

I am currently use winxp pro and last night I installed win98 on a second hard drive. I've done this before and when I reboot it should ask me what OS i want to use. This didnt happen for some reason. So I installed BootMagic that comes with Partition Magic so that it would give me the choice. I rebooted but nothing happened so I unplugged the second hard drive and rebooted again and now every time i get the message:

-..||..
error reading from disk

This happens with the Winxp hard drive but the Win98 hard drive boots up fine if its the only one plugged in.

Does this mean that the winxp hard drive is dead or is there something i can do to get the data off of it. Winxp harddrive is NFTS and win98 is FAT32.

In order for this to work you nees to install WinXP last. I'm not an expert on dual booting but what you ned to do is check the jumpers on the hard drive and then edit boot.ini. Others willtel you what needs to be in the file

Have you tried to put 98 as the primary drive and XP as the secondary?

This should result in 98 booting up with no sign of XP. At this time you should then be able to do a repair install of XP so that it will create the boot menu and recognize the XP install on the secondary drive.

problem with that is that win98 doesnt recongise the xp hard drive

You will neex the XP CD. Since the XP drive is probably NTFS, Windows 9X xannot read NTFS this is not surprising.

problem with that is that win98 doesnt recongise the xp hard drive

This is not a problem. As classicsoftware said, 98 cannot read NTFS.

We aren't too concerned about having 98 see the NTFS drive since the boot method will actually be handled by XP. Unless you want to be able to share XP data with 98 in which case you can either make sure your saving the data to the 98 drive when your in XP or format the XP drive as fat32 (not recommended).

so the solution would be:

1. connect both hardrives. win98 one will be master. winxp one will be slave
2. boot into 98 and then use xp disk to upgrade xp drive

or should i boot from the xp disk?

Boot from the XP disk. XP should have an option to repair the existing install which will allow you to create a boot menu which will allow you to choose from either XP or 98 on boot.

It's not quite clear what you did but installing Win98 after WinXP is always fraught with problems unless it is installed into the only visible and active primary partition at that time and which is not the active partition being used by WinXP. Installing Win98 after WinXP not only may disrupt the boot files and boot-pointers BUT WILL ALSO REPLACE THE BOOT PARTITION'S BOOT SECTOR. When WinXP is installed after Win98 (from the same active partition) it makes a copy of the Win98 boot sector (as bootsect.dos file) replaces the Win98 boot sector with its own one, and creates a dual boot menu. When Win98 is chosen from this menu it utilises the bootsect.dos file and not the partition boot sector for the boot-up.

A Win98 installation cannot setup a dual-boot menu and, as seems to have happened, can corrupt booting to Win2K/XP. Subsequent installation of BootMagic may have further complicated things since this overlays the MBR.

I agree with other peeps who suggest doing a Repair Installation (http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm) of WinXP. I would only add that I would remove BootMagic first (or you may have problems with it later if any partition structures are changed in the interim) and run the repair by booting to the installation CD and at a time when you are booting OK into Win98.

PS
"Error reading from disk" could be for a couple of reasons and hopefully the partition tables in the mbr of the master have not been corrupted. Does PM see all the partitions normally (both PM and GDB for NTFS will see NTFS from within a FAT installation. In addition if you run PM from within Win98 you can use its Browse function to read and copy/paste files in the NTFS partition(s).

You can run PartitionInfo from it's Tools sub-menu to give you any further information. If the partition tables are OK, the other approach would be to have only the master in situ, boot to the WinXP CD and go into the Recovery Console and run both fixmbr and fixboot from the command prompt there.

If losing data is your main concern get GetDataBack for NTFS (http://www.runtime.org/) and run it from Win98 on the second hdd before doing anything else that involves writing anything to the original master hdd containing WinXP.

Final thoughts: there is nothing in the floppy drive and the master is detected in the BIOS ??

The way I read it is, the Win 98 HDD is (or has one partition) set as primary, and active, and installed as slave, to the previous XP install. Yanking the drive after installing the PM software only leads it to errors.

Working with multiboots may work a bit better if on one harddrive for starters (newbies), but using 2 is ok, just don't confuse your boot manager by changing things (drives) on a whim.

Also, if this is what you've done, as I have at times, used multi harddrives with different OS'es, you're only asking for problems trying to set it up permanently with a standalone 'manager'.

Such programs want to be set up with hardware and software from scratch. Otherwize they get confused faster than a blonde...