Sarasota PC Monitor
Tech Talk (07/03)
Dual-Boot Setup
by Brian K. Lewis, Ph.D.*
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.Setting up your computer so you can boot into different operating systems is not really as difficult as you might think. Most Linux systems provide an automatic option to boot into Linux or Windows at the time of installation. Since most of you would already have a Windows operating system (OS) installed, adding a Linux OS would simply be a matter of following the on-screen prompts. When I installed Lindows on my Win98 system the installation software asked if I wanted to replace Windows or setup a dual boot. After selecting the dual-boot configuration, Lindows installed a boot menu. Now, every time the system boots, I can select the OS I want to run. It really couldn't have been simpler.
Another option is to install BootMagic after adding a Linux partition to your computer. This software is provided with PowerQuest's PartitionMagic. Another combination partition manager/boot manager is BootIT (http://terabyteunlimited.com/index.html). Its current price is $34.95. There are other boot managers available, some of which are freeware. However, as with all freeware, they may not always work and they may disrupt the boot sectors on your hard drive. So before installing and running any freeware or any software that will affect your boot sectors, ALWAYS BACK UP your hard drive. With that said, other boot managers are: Masterbooter (www.masterbooter.com) can handle 3 partitions. Symon (http://symon.da.ru/) can handle up to 36 partitions. Only version 2 is freeware.
Now let's be certain that you have followed the discussion this far by checking some terminology. Every hard disk has to be partitioned and formatted before you install an OS. You probably purchased a system that already had an OS installed. If it has a single partition it will be referred to as the C drive. You can divide a drive into multiple partitions and each will be assigned a drive letter. For example, you can divide a 40 GB hard drive into 4 partitions, each 10 GB in size. Under the Windows OS that would give you drive letters C, D, E and F. Suppose, instead of dividing the drive you simply added a second hard drive to your system. After you partitioned it with Fdisk and formatted it, this drive would be assigned letter D. You can also add logical partitions to this second drive and Fdisk assigns the drive letters to it.
The C drive usually contains the primary active partition. In a multi-boot system, the primary active partition may also be referred to as the system partition or system startup partition. There will also be one boot partition for each OS installed on the computer. The boot partition can be on any partition of the computer including the system startup partition. To make this clearer, consider your single OS Windows computer. The system startup partition is the C drive and the boot partition is also the C drive. The boot partition contains the Windows directory and all of its subdirectories. It is entirely possible to partition a single drive into a small partition containing the system startup files, a second partition with the boot partition files and a third partition with all the other programs and data.
Now, when a computer boots, the sequence is determined by the basic input/output system (BIOS) settings. The bootup sequence uses the first sector of the first physical disk seen by the BIOS. This is usually listed as drive 0. A second physical disk, as opposed to a second partition on the first disk, would be listed as drive 1. So the BIOS finds the first disk and reads the master boot record (MBR). The MBR is not file system or OS dependent. If there is a boot menu, it is read and put on the screen. Once the OS is selected, the boot sector is loaded and the system startup partition is read. This loads the selected OS.
So now you should realize that in order to setup any multi-boot system you should have a partition for each OS. If you want to have a dual-boot system using the same or different version of Windows, Microsoft says you can install the directories in the same partition. However, this can cause problems that will be avoided if you install the OSs in different partitions.
Let's consider one Windows dual-boot setup adding Windows XP to a Windows 98/98SE/ME system. Windows XP is designed to install and work other OSs. (The process would be similar for Windows 2000.) If you have Windows 9X/ME on your hard drive it is probably installed on drive C. Normally it will also be using a FAT32 file system. (If it is a FAT file system, you are limited to a 2 GB partition. FAT32 can use up to 7.8 GB in a single partition. It can be larger if the BIOS and the IDE controller support INT13 extensions.) To install Windows XP as a second OS with a dual boot menu do not select the upgrade option when you start the installation. Instead, select to install XP in a separate partition. You can also select either FAT32 or NTFS as the file system for XP. You must leave the C drive formatted with FAT32 in order for Windows 9X/ME to boot. However, the partition that contains WinXP can be formatted with NTFS. After installation, WinXP will be able to find and read files on the FAT32 partition as well as its own NTFS partition. However, the Win9X/ME will be able to use only the FAT32 partition. If you need to have Win9X/ME read the files created by WinXP, then the new partition should also be formatted with FAT32. Note that you don't have to create or format the WinXP partition. This will be done automatically as part of the installation process.
WinXP will save the original Win9X/ME boot sector to a file called "bootsec.dos". The option to boot to this OS is included in the WinXP boot menu.
Now, if you want to install a Win9X/ME system on a computer that already has WinXP or 2k installed, you can create a problem. The Win9X/ME boot sector files will overwrite the WinXP/2K boot sector and you won't be able to boot from WinXP/2K. You will have to repair the WinXP/2K boot sector in order to setup the dual boot menu. There is a free utility that can repair this boot sector that you can download from: http://tweakhomepc.virtualave.net/dual/bootsectdos.html.
Anytime you set up a dual or multi-boot system you must create a boot disk for each operating system. The most common problems that occur in dual-boot systems are caused by a missing or corrupt loader files. These can be restored providing you can boot the system with a floppy or a bootable CD. Don't try to reinstall the operating system that won't boot until you have tried all the possible options to repair the system. For more detailed information on repairing these systems go to: http://tweakhomepc.virtualave.net/dual/repairdualboot.html.
This TweakHomePC web site has the most complete information I've found on multi-boot installation and repair. All of their material is available in printer-friendly format. They also have a list of Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles related to multi-booting of all Windows versions. However, they list them with the Q prefix that is no longer used by Microsoft. So in some cases, you may need to search on the title or a portion of the title to find the complete Microsoft reference.
You may have noticed that I avoided any refernec to using Windows 95 in this discussion. There are several reasons for this. Win95 is available in three different versions (original or a, b & c). The original version uses the FAT file system and is unable to address any partition larger than 2 GB. With the sizes of today's hard drives, this is a severe limitation. In addition all three versions of Win95 have problems with resource memory management. This is responsible for many of the system crashes or lockup experience by users. These problems were largely addressed and overcome in Win98/98SE. Win95 is no longer supported by Microsoft and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find software compatible with it. Lastly, may Win95 systems do not have the hardware power needed to run WinXP or Win2K. In my opinion, your best option in this case would be to explore installing a Linux OS. That would give you a modern OS that will run on limited hardware.
For those of you looking for information on Linux versions running from CD's, please try again next month. I didn't get enough testing done before the submission deadline.
*Dr. Lewis is a former university & medical school professor. He has been working with personal computers for more than thirty years. He can be reached via e-mail at bwsail@yahoo.com or voice mail at 941/925-3047. :
Copyright 2003. This article is from the July 2003 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
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