Dual Booting NTFS & FAT32 - Can it be done?

[Mr.James]

I have two seperate drives. The first, an 80gb NTFS drive which must remain the primary partition as it's faster and I need the security.
The second drive is a 40gb FAT32. I've tried specifying d:\ = "DOS" in my boot.ini but it just reboots the computer.

Any ideas?

[Pegasus]

What are you trying to do exactly?

[dingle_666]

yeah pleas eexplain what os's ur using

[Aido]

You'd probably get away if you were using something like PQBoot?? Think it comes with Partition Magic nowadays.. Even LILO might do it (you'd need Linux tho')

I think Win9x had to have a couple of files on the Active partition, ie the boot one, things like command.com, io.sys etc.

That's probably where the problem is since that partition is NTFS.

One way you might get away with it would be to make a small FAT partition on one of the disks, make it active, and then NT & Win9x could bung their boot files on there, it would mean you reinstalling both OS's tho.

Don't know if this is 100% tho to be fair, you can definitely do it the other way tho, ie FAT primary, NTFS anywhere else..

[Mr.James]

I just want to be able to have an NTFS drive as my primary drive and a bootable FAT32 as a secondary. I've know it's not recommended having the drives this way round but I was just wondering if there was an easy way of fooling Windows.

Originally I had an 80gb Win98 FAT32 primary + 40gb 2k NTFS secondary with dual boot on the 1st drive. Problem is I need the security on my 80gb drive so I've had to convert it to NTFS. I now want to shift Win98 to the secondary drive.

I've got Partition Magic and RedHat 7.2 but for what it's worth (about 110gb if it f_cks up) I may as well just disconnect the primary drive when needed or boot from floppy.

Thanks for the advice.

[Aido]

Wouldn't it be quicker to change the boot order in the BIOS from C to D (or whatever the drive is??)

[zulu95e]

Your boot.ini file should probably read similar to this I think

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
D:\="Microsoft Windows 98"

[VaMpY]

I use system commander 7.05 thought it was better than sucky partition magic, u can do what u want with this nice proggy

can be found here http://www.sling.to/fosi/

enjoy