Dual Booting OS/2
Question:My PC have two physical hard drives. Primary Master hard drive has Windows 95. I want to install OS/2 to Secondary Master. It's FAT format. I want to let Windows manager the dual boot. How can I achieve this?
anonymous
Answer:Windows, unlike other operating systems, doesn't like the idea of co-existing with other operating systems on the same computer. Therefore windows doesn't have a dual-boot capability. Windows NT/2000/XP can dual boot but only with other windows versions.
To dual boot Windows and OS/2 you will need to do one of two things.
- The first option is to install the boot manager that comes with OS/2 and use it to select between windows and OS/2. Unfortunately, this needs to be installed in its own partition on the primary drive so if your Windows partition already takes up the whole drive you will have to use a third party partitioning tool such as partition magic or partitionit if you want to make space for the boot manager partition without having to wipe the windows partition and start over.
- The second option is to install a third party boot manager. These either come as stand alone products such as system commander or are supplied as part of a product package such as boot magic which comes with partition magic.
For more info on drive partitioning see my page on partitioning which also has a link to a free partitioning tool/boot manager that you may be able to use. I have used it to change partition types but haven't used it for resizing partitions or as a boot manager as I have Partition Magic which provides a much easier to use interface than the free program does.
I recommend taking a backup of everything on your system before you start changing anything just in case something goes wrong. This applies regardless of which option you wish to take.
The other thing I would recommend that you do is to convert the OS/2 partition to HPFS when you perform the OS/2 install unless you require for windows to be able to write to that drive. There are hpfs drivers available that can be installed on Windows allowing it to read (but not write to) hpfs drives.
Related Articles
- More on Dual Booting
- DOS and Win-OS/2 Settings
- Basic Multimedia
- Accessing HPFS from a DOS boot
- The Start Command
