At 08:59 AM 9/21/98 -0400, Donald Rex Gaither wrote:
>There is at least one program on the market that allows NT 4.0
>to read FAT32, but it cannot read a FAT32 boot partion.
This limitation with Winternals' "FAT32" program is because NT
must be booted before the FAT32 driver is enabled. You can't
load NT from a FAT32 partition because the program that loads
NT (called from the Master Boot Record) can't read the NT boot
files if they are on a FAT32 drive. The most important
consequence of this is that you can't dual boot WinNT4 and Win9x
in the normal way (with NT's boot.ini file stored in the Win9x
boot partition) if the Win9x partition is FAT32. (Boot.ini
contains the information that the ntloader uses to choose what
partition to boot.)
You can successfully dual boot Win9x (installed in a FAT32
partition) and WinNT4 using a third party boot loader program.
I use System Commander. When it starts up (it's stored in the
MBR, not in any partition), it lets you point the computer
either to the NT4 boot files in their own partition, or the
Win9x boot files in their FAT32 partition, or any other
operating system that you have installed. (System Commander is
particularly useful because it does not take up a primary
partition for itself like some other third party boot loader
programs. You install it from Win9x or DOS but, as I said, it
doesn't live in any partition.)
Once WinNT4 is running, I can read the FAT32 drives (including
the FAT32 drive that would boot Win98) since Winternals' driver
is enabled by that time.
By the way, you can have more than one copy of WinNT4 installed
on your computer in case one of them becomes unbootable and
is not accessable from DOS (if it's NTFS formatted). You can
boot from the other NT and access the first one's boot partition.
No need for third party boot managers to do this if you have the
NT4 boot files located in a FAT16 or NTFS bootable partition.
NT4's own multi-boot manager works well for this.
See <http://www.winternals.com/fat32.html> for more information
about the WinNT4 FAT32 driver.
Regards,
Bill
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