DescentBB

Anyone have some tricks/pointers?

Installed a new SATA 150 drive, disconnected the 2 IDE drives, partitioned SATA with Windows, apart from losing my audio with SP2 patches everything ok.

Shut down, plug in other drives, ok... they show fine in Explorer.

Use Partition magic and Boot magic, (now I know that if things partition or boot right... it's magic!)

create a fat 32 partition on SATA for boot magic and reboot, then use boot magic to pick up other OS's on drives.

They show up in boot magic running in XP on the main drive. All seems fine. Reboot and get the boot console and then poof... I see my first XP install and 2 red "x's" where the other two OS's should be.

Ran setup to check on the partition info... Umm any guesses as to why it would show my Win98 partition as an OS2 partition, and then hoark up my other XP partition?

It reboots when I try to goto XP and shuts down with vxb errors on the 98 side. I'm thinking of two things to try,

one is checking and editing if need be the boot.ini file on the old xp partition, or removing the drive with the screwed tables and running 98 setup over the 98 install and see if that comes back.

One consolation is I backed up the entire 98 partition last week.

Using the recovery, (laugh) disks I get the, "too many errors" error then it reboots or hangs

Man at least I'm posting now and the SATA is noticably faster.

Egads Its late!

*Bleary eyed and thinking pleasant thoughts about Symantec in Nuckland.

Ok tried the boot.ini thing, it was messed up.
I did boot once succesfully into 98, then registry checker came on and said there was a problem with the registry and that it would "fix" it.

It sure did... now can't even boot.
When I figure things out I'll post a fix.

Did you try using their partitioning software?

Maxtor's MaxBlast 4 bootable CD ISO

Western Digital Data Lifeguard series

Assuming 98 doesnt have any problems with your SATA controllers, what you should do is partition and format the drive completely outside the control of windows, then start with 98, then install XP after that. When installed on a seprate partition the XP bootloader will automatically include 98 in the options. I've done it a couple times in the past when XP was less then a year old and never had a problem, much less effort then trying to use any non-microsoft boot loader. Course that is no help if you are mixing a non microsoft OS in there...

Otherwise now would be a good time to abandon 98, spend some time working on it and you will probably be able to do everything you need in XP alone.

Excellent advice Krom. This is for you 98/XP/Linux/etc., multi-boot junkies.

I had that setup as you described with an ATA 133 controller from Promise. I removed it, and installed one with an ATA 133 and SATA 150 controller.

Come to think of it my system went belly up right at the controller setup. It was almost there

Oh and that was a 4 year running 98 install... I guess I was living dangerously anyways

So lesson learned, have a new HD Controller board? Have 98? Then;

Start off installs with a single drive on the mobo's own IDE connector, or another system. Then install card and move HD to card. Saves grief like this.

Restoring 98 with ghost,

Nuck out.

If you have drivers for your SATA controller, I tinhk you get the option to install them at the start of 98 install also with the SCSI or RAID devices.

Not sure if this helps or not.

Thats what was happening, it starting the driver install when it went poof.

CDN_Merlin wrote:If you have drivers for your SATA controller, I tinhk you get the option to install them at the start of 98 install also with the SCSI or RAID devices.

Not sure if this helps or not.

I'm not sure 98 does anything like that, I'm fairly certain only the NT Windows let you install third external drivers at install time. Then again, it's been so long since I installed Win98 I can't remember one way or the other.

The addendum that came with my KX18D Pro II says to install 98 *before* messing with the SATA drivers but that's of little help.

It booted to desktop, recognized the card, asked for the floppy, read the disk, installed the card and right then, poof... registry errors galore.

Couldn't stop them all.

Hmm...

The procedure listed in the addendum that came with my board mentions installing the SATA drivers manually through the Device Manager and not the startup wizard but I can't see how that would matter myself. To be honest though, I'd simply take it as a sign and give up trying to install 98 altogether.

Ahh I never give up

I have a working XP install on a partition with all my essential stuff... and If I'm desperate I can still run games off of the other drives.

I'll partiton another chunk of the drive for multiboot and see how it goes (crosses all appendages).

Besides I like running D2 3D_FX in Dos, all I need is 60 fps and a 233 MMX.