Roger said...
>I have for some time been trying to install Windows NT 4.0 on the same disk
>that hosts Windows 98 SE.
Mark said...
>The way I prefer to do it is to create a small FAT16 primary partition for the boot >files... the C drive. It can be as small as a couple of hundred megs. Then I create a >extended partition with the rest of the available drives and fill it with logical drives.

Hi Everyone,
I wanted to summarise the information I made use of to resolve the above situation and disclose what I have discovered.
For the record I did this on my other machine which consists of a 6.4MB HDD, 128 MB RAM.
I started by using Partition Magic to create four partitions. The first C: was the primary and I made this 200 MB - it's purpose to act as a boot sector for all the O/Ses that will be installed. The other primary partition is the extended partition which holds the three logical drives. One for '98 (I made this 3.5GB), one for NT 4.0 W/Station (this one being 1.46GB) and finally the last being for backups from my other PC via the network, (Only 800MB's but sufficient for critical files).
As Mark so rightly pointed out NTFS and FAT32 do not see each other. So I made my C: partition FAT16, '98 I kept FAT32, (it can see and access FAT16 but FAT16 can not access FAT32), NT was made FAT16 not NTFS and the backup partition was made FAT16 largely because it is less than 2 GB and I don't think I had any choice.
Once the partitions were set up and formatted in the appropriate FAT, I installed Windows 98 first. The only thing that had to be done was to designate the area where to install Windows when prompted by Set up, I changed the default from C:\Windows to E:\Windows - yes E:, but this would normally be D: - Let me explain, I have a 350 MB HDD, (don't laugh) - and decided to put it to work, I'll explain later, but as a consequence the next available drive letter was E:. To my surprise Windows booted fine and put the boot files into C: automatically.
I installed NT and selected F: as the designated partition, it was a good clean install and the boot.ini file put itself where it needed to be in C: and now NT offers a menu to boot into either NT or '98.
Be warned when installing drivers and applications, most will default to the Windows designated partition automatically. Some however are not that smart and you need to be vigilant as it will most likely default to C:
Now Mark mentioned Swap files...
>On the C drive I like to put the swap file at a fixed amount and then tell >everybody to use the same one. NT4 and Windows 2000 both use pagefile.sys as a >swap file. With Windows 9X you need only put this in your system.ini file >under 386Enh section to have Windows use pagefile.sys.
>PagingDrive=C:
>Pagingfile=C:\pagefile.sys
>MinPagingFileSize=200000
>MaxPagingFileSize=200000
I decided to give this a whirl and read somewhere that swap files work even better on a different HDD to that where the O?S and applications are running from. So I made use of the little 350 MB HDD. Now I am told that swap files should be incremented in size when fixed as follows...
96 MBs (3x32) for 32 MBs of RAm
160 MBs (2.5x64) for 64 MBs of RAM
256 MBs (2x128) for 128 MBs of RAM
What I did was boot into NT, right click My Computer and select the tab called Performance. Clicking "Change" I selected the D: drive and set the minimum and maximum to 256 MB's respectively. It is critical that the file sizes are the same or it will cause defragmentation of the drive. NT requires rebooting to create pagefile.sys. Once done I rebooted into '98 and from Start - Run launched System.ini. The notepad window that opened has the files about how Windows should manage itself. Scrolling down to the section title [386Enh] I found the last entry as being "paging=on". I deleted this entry and added the following in its place...
PagingDrive=D:
PagingFile=D:\Pagefile.sys
MinPagingFileSize=262144
MaxPagingFileSize=262144
The file was saved and the machine rebooted.
The unusual file size number will appear as 256 Mb's in the virtual memory settings, if you right click My Computer and select Performance - Virtual Memory you'll see that Windows no longer handles the swap file but makes use of your new entries made in the System.ini file.
Everything seems to work fine, thanks for the help.

Regards Roger.

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