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HOW TO ADD WINDOWS 98 0R WINDOWS 95 TO YOUR WINDOWS NT PRE – INSTALLED SYSTEM.

Everyone knows that we can install WINDOWS NT to a system having FAT16 file system or Windows 95 installed.

Everyone knows that we can install WINDOWS NT to a system having FAT16 file system or Windows 95
installed. But what if a system comes with NT pre – installed and the primary partition is NTFS and you want to install Windows 98/95 to it and have a dual boot between
this. Everyone believes that you can’t dual boot NTFS and FAT32 without a third party boot manager unless you install WINDOWS 98 first.

Ordinarily the trick to dual booting WINDOWS NT and WINDOWS 98/95 is to install WINDOWS 98
first, then WINDOWS NT. During installation WINDOWS NT replaces WINDOWS 98’s bootstrap files with it’s own multiboot operating system
loader, NTLDR and creates entries for WINDOWS 98 and WINDOWS NT on the multiboot menu and write those entries to a file called ‘bootsect.dos’.
However WINDOWS NT will not boot or install if drive C: is FAT32 partition. And if your system came with WINDOWS NT preinstalled ,WINDOWS 98’s setup program won’t run in WINDOWS NT.

This is where third party boot managers can come in handy. But why pay good money for such a utility when NTLDR is a
perfectly fine alternative and is free? With the aid of WINDOWS 98’s FDISK disk partitioning tool, you can easily install WINDOWS 98 to a FAT32 partition and add it to the WINDOWS NT boot
menu. Assuming that you have sufficient free drive space to create FAT32 partition.

Here is how to dual boot NTFS and FAT32.

Boot the system with a WINDOWS 98 CD-ROM (it is bootable, if it is not booting make necessary changes in the BIOS
setup). After this enter FDISK at command prompt. When FDISK asks whether you want to
enable large disk support type ‘Y’. The utility will then ask you if you want to treat the existing NTFS partition as a large
volume. It doesn’t matter what your answer is, since we’re not going to touch the NTFS partition. I typed ‘N’. Next press ‘1’ then ‘1’ again to create a primary DOS partition – a logical drive in an extended partition. Answer the remaining prompts to finish creating the
partition, then reboot the system with the WINDOWS 98 CD – ROM. Next format the new partition using the command ‘format C:’ Don’t worry your NTFS partition is safe and sound because WINDOWS 98 cannot access NTFS. Then go through the WINDOWS 98 setup program.

Once WINDOWS 98 is installed, reboot your system with WINDOWS 98 CD – ROM and run FDISK and press ‘2’ then ‘1’ to make NTFS drive the active or bootable partition. Next answer the remaining prompts and remove the CD and reboot. Now the computer should boot to WINDOWS
NT.

STEP 3

ADD WINDOWS 98 TO WINDOWS NT’s BOOTMENU

Download and extract bootpartition2.20 from www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

then copy bootpart.exe to your root (C:). Select start —> run and type ‘CMD’ to enter command
prompt. Then type ‘bootpart’ to display a list of boot sectors that are available on the
system. Then type boopart1 boot98.bin Microsoft Windows 98, then type exit to return to WINDOWS NT. That’s
it. It will create a logical partition and add the files needed for booting WINDOWS 98 to a file called boot98.bin and update boot.ini by adding the message ‘Microsoft Windows 98’.

The next time you start WINDOWS NT you’ll see ‘Microsoft Windows 98’ at the bottom of the multiboot
menu. You can use bootpart.exe to add other operating systems like LINUX, BeOS to WINDOWS NT’s bootmenu as
well. However the bootpartition author says that you can’t add OS/2 to the NT’s boot menu.