dual booting win2k and winME

[cheapass]

I am having some trouble dual booting my system. Windows 2000 is currently installed on my 4th partition (F)
Yesterday, I formatted my Win98 (C). I then did a clean install of WinME on the (C) or primary partition. The install went smoothly, except my problem now is that I didn't realize that my NTLDR would not load anymore, because I guess it was located on the primary partition (C) which I formatted!!! Man, so now I don't know what to do.

The following files:

boot.ini, bootsect.dos, ntldr, ntdetect.com and ntbootdd.sys

I presume were located on the primary active partition.. which was my (C) drive of course.

Any ideas as to what I can do to get the NTLDR to work, so I can dual boot my system again???

Thanks for any posts or responses.. all help is appreciated.

Oh, I have also tried setting my (F) as the active partition but to no avail.

 

[TwiSTEd365]

I'd try to boot with the Win2k CD, and select Recovery or Repair (whichever it is, i can't remember.) I think there's a way to recover the Master Boot Record that way. Another possible remedy would be to install a third party boot loader (like PowerQuest's boot magic or System V's System Commander) in win98. If you can't get WinME to boot, get a win98 startup disk, load it up, and type sys c: to make your winME partition bootable again.

Hope this helps, I'll make sure and check back in the forum.

twiste365@hotmail.com

 

[Changlinn]

Use boot magic it rocks, I successfully boot 4 os's.
What I want to know is how to disable that nt loader as atm i chose the os then the nt loader comes up and asks me to chose between which versions of windows I want again, how do I disable the nt loader? (with out a format of c)

 

[cheapass]

Thanks for the advice Twisted365, and Changlinn

Well, here is what I did...
I worked on it all evening yesterday, I tried booting to the Win2K CD and selecting Repair, but that didn't work cause I didn't have a repair disk.. hehe... (you need the actual emergency repair diskette to fix your repair). So then I tried going to the Win2k control console from the CD and tried running the command: "fixboot c:" This only made the c: partition unbootable because it was now trying to load Win2k, but the NTLDR file was still not present!

Obviously That didn't work, so I had to "sys c:" from a WinME bootup diskette. And now I was back to square one and booting to WinME again.

I then tried running System Commander 2000, but it turns out that there is a new version that you have to purchase so it can run on WinME. Of course, I didn't have that... SOL...

Then I tried running boot magic (from Powerquest) but that didn't recognize WinME and they haven't even come out with an updated version for WinME as of yet.

Then I went out and tried to look for another boot program, it was called Bootstar 5.86. That supposedly supported WinME, and I installed it and it worked okay. But it didn't detect that I had Win2k installed even when I pointed the program to boot Win2k at startup. So now what?

I then reluctantly tried running Powerquest's Lost and Found to see if the files that I had formatted were there (NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, PAGEFILE.SYS etc.) and that didn't work either. (Because of the format, hehe)

So, now what? Well, I decided to do an install of Win2k from within Windows ME. As I was going through the setup process, and only if you are doing a clean install on a different partition and not an upgrade from WinMe to Win2K, then Win2k actually copies bootup files to the c:\

It creates a directory called c:\$WIN_NT$.~BT which actually contains all the necessary files for the Win2K setup process. In addition, it installs a version of boot.ini, NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM. (Kick ass right???) Well, sort of, the boot.ini file actually will boot using the c:\$WIN_NT$.~BT system files.

So here is how the boot.ini file looked now:

[Boot Loader]
Timeout=5
Default=C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT\BOOTSECT.DAT
[Operating Systems]
C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Setup"
C:\="Microsoft Windows"

Well, as you can see, it's options are either to run "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Setup" or "Microsoft Windows" (which is ME)

Okay, now what? what you do is alter the boot.ini file to this:

[Boot Loader]
Timeout=5
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINNT
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINNT=="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional"
C:\="Microsoft Windows Millenium Edition"

You will notice that partition(4) is '4' because that is where my Win2k is located on F: if you recall, thus c: =1 d: =2 e: =3 and f: =4.

In my case, I used 4. You will also notice that I renamed "Microsoft Windows" to "Microsoft Windows Millenium Edition" so this is the option that will show up during bootup.

Well, it works, I am now happy one happy girl.