OS does not load !

[Suchy]

I have a dual-boot PC (Win 98SE on C: and Win XP Pro on D: ).

XP starts up fine, but when I want to start 98 I get the following message before windows starts:

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

and then:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key

How can I fix this for 98 to load?

[Paul Komski]

How are you dual booting and how many hard drives?

Do you use a 3rd Party boot manager or just the dual boot menu set up by WinXP and using boot.ini.

[Suchy]

Both OS's are on one HD which also has some unallocated space.
I use Win XP boot.ini. Here is a exact copy:


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Microsoft Windows 98"



One thing that I noticed is when I boot from the Win 98 instalation CD and use the D:\>dir command, contants from CD-Rom are listed and E: is the drive with Win XP.
But since it is NTFS the files are not listed.


But under Win XP, C: has the 98 files and D: has the XP files and E: is the CD-Rom, samething when I boot using ERD Commander 2002. Also when I hook up the HD to my laptop (Win XP Tablet Edition) usind a IDE-USB cable, drive D: has win 98 and E: has XP. My laptop has no CD-ROM

[Paul Komski]

Since WinXP boots OK we can assume that there is no problem with the BIOS boot order, nor with the active partition being so marked nor that a floppy or CD have been left in their respective drives.

This makes it look as though the Win98 boot files msdos.sys, io.sys and command.com could be absent or corrupted or that the original boot sector file bootsect.dos is also bad or absent.

The usual way of correcting the Win98 boot-up would be to sys the C: drive from a Win98 boot floppy diskette but if you do this you will lose the immediate bootability of WinXP since its boot sector will be overwritten. If you are prepared to reinstate the WinXP boot sector with fixboot C: from the WinXP recovery console after you have sys'd the C: drive you could attempt this. It would be wise to first format a floppy FROM WINXP and copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini to the floppy and then test that you can boot up WinXP from that floppy - that would give you a way to still get to WinXP if sysing the C: drive fouls things up.

Don't worry about the different drive letters as seen from the the different boot ups you have described - they are all normal and just a function of how Win9x dynamically assigns drive letters and that WinXP normally shows the active partition (containing the Win98 files) as the C: drive.