Last time around I extolled the virtues of running Windows NT as my daily operating system, but noted it's lack of gaming support. This month I'll look at setting up one computer to dual boot between Windows 98 and Windows NT. If your hard drive or drives are smaller than 8 GB, then you'll require no additional software other than NT and 98. Unfortunately I've had nothing but problems trying to get this to work on larger drives without using Powerquest's Partition Magic; alas I digress. Why dual boot? The best of both worlds. A solid application platform with good security and performance coupled with a the best gaming platform available. One point of caution; for this article I expect you to know how to install Windows NT and Windows 98. Let's get started.
I have found a three partition system works best; a common 16 bit FAT ( or FAT 16 ) partition as the C: drive, Windows NT installed on an NTFS partition and Windows 98 on a FAT32 partition. This way each operating system sees the C: drive and itself; NT can't see FAT32 partitions and 98 can't see NTFS partitions, so each system will have a C: and D: drive. For the uninitiated, partitioning is a way of segmenting a hard drive into smaller parts. Think of your hard drive as a pie: each partition is a slice, and for this article we're cutting the pie into three pieces. The first partition is the common FAT 16; both Windows 98 and Windows NT can read FAT 16 drives, and so the boot information can reside there. I use the FAT 16 drive to store common files like downloads and documents I might need in either operating system. Also, I get NT and 98 to use a common swap file on the FAT 16 partition. The NTFS partition is for Windows NT, and should be a good size since most of your applications and the bulk of your work will be done from NT. The third partition is FAT 32 and should probably be the largest partition since this one's for games, and they take a lot of hard disk space. It doesn't really matter for this article if you use one hard drive and split it up, use three separate drives or land somewhere in between. What matters is that the primary partition on the first hard drive is FAT 16. Time to get our hands dirty.
Using the Windows 98 start up disk, boot from the disk and using FDISK create a primary partition. When FDISK starts it asks if you want to use the large drive option; say no since we want a FAT 16 partition. The size is up to you; I was using a 9 GB hard drive, so I made the FAT 16 partition 1 GB, which should give me enough room for most things. Reboot and format the drive.
Next boot from your three NT disks and in the free space left on the drive create a partition and format it using NTFS. Using the default drivers from NT the largest partition it will accept ( after a few reboots from this point ) is 4 GB; it's a limitation Microsoft knows about and tried to fix by releasing a separate IDE driver for this very phase. I find it's more trouble than it's worth, but that's my opinion. For my 9 GB drive, a 4 GB NTFS partition is plenty so I go with it. Continue with the NT installation until you're finished. Get things the way you like them, including Service Pack 6A. Create a rescue disk and keep it handy.
Last stop is installing Windows 98. Boot from your 98 start up disk and start FDISK: this time around say yes to large drives. Create a partition with the remaining space, in my case 4 GB. Reboot and format the drive; remember that Windows 98 can't see the NTFS partition, so don't worry about formatting it by accident. Each operating system sees itself using the D: drive. Once formatted install Windows 98 and set it up the way you like it.
You probably noticed by now that the computer is just booting into Windows 98, like it's forgotten all about NT. We fix it by booting from the three NT disks and selecting repair installation from the menu. Of the choices available, only select boot sector. You'll be prompted for the repair disk and told to reboot. When you reboot you'll see the NT boot menu with a third option available; Microsoft Windows 98. That wasn't so bad after all. This would also work if you needed MS-DOS 6.22 for some strange reason; just install it on the C: drive, and after the boot repair it would be a fourth option.
To set both operating systems using the same swap file, follow on. The swap file is used by Microsoft operating systems as a way to store items when you run out of available RAM. First start NT, right click on My Computer, select properties. Select the performance tab, and under virtual memory select change. You'll see that you're using the D: drive for the paging file ( NT's name for swap file ). Change the size of the paging file on D: to 5 MB minimum and maximum, then select the C: drive and create a swap file with the size equal to your total RAM plus 12. I have 256 MB of RAM so I chose a paging file size of 268. Microsoft came up with this weird formula, so I figured why not use it. Now that you've got the paging file on the C: drive, reboot to Windows 98 and right click on My Computer. Choose System properties, click the virtual memory button and select le me specify my own virtual memory settings. Pick the C: drive and set the minimum and maximum size to the same as your did in Windows NT. Now go to run and type "notepad c:\windows\system.ini"; go to the [386enh] section and add the following lines: "PagingDrive=C:" and "PagingFile=C:\pagefile.sys". Save the file and reboot. Now both operating systems are using pagefile.sys as the swap file.
The installation procedure goes much smoother if you've got access to a good partitioning utility like Powerquest Partition Magic. For systems with larger drives, you can create the default 4 GB NT partition, finish the installation, then use Partition Magic to resize the partition to whatever you want. For this project, I created all three partitions at once and then installed everything quick and easy. Currently at version 5, it really is the easiest way to create, change and remove partitions. It allows you to convert partitions as well, like NTFS to FAT32 and back. Not a lot has to be said about Partition Magic; it does it's job well.
by Scott VanderPloeg
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