CamTron Posted January 18, 2015 Share Posted January 18, 2015 (edited) I have a 2001 Dell PC with Windows XP and Windows 98 SE. When I installed Windows 98 and re-installed XP about a year ago, I created a 6 GB (C:) partition for Win98 and the rest of the disk (D:) for WinXP. I edited boot.ini to give a nice menu upon boot, and all was well. Eventually, 6 GB became to small for me, and I needed to expand the partition. I booted up a live Linux USB pendrive a few days ago and used Gparted to expand the Win98 partition to 60 GB and shrink the WinXP partition. Apparently, Gparted touched something in the MBR that it shouldn't have, and I got the "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk and press any key" message when trying to boot Win98. XP had no problems booting after the partition resize. I booted up a Win98 startup floppy disk and ran sys c: which then allowed Win98 to boot up correctly, but I no longer get the boot menu to select XP. I can make XP boot again by booting up the recovery console from the CD and running fixboot, but then this makes Win98 give the "Invalid system disk" message when trying to boot it. My problem is that I can get either XP or Win98 to boot, but not both. How do I restore the proper boot sectors to allow me to dual-boot the OSes? Edited January 18, 2015 by CamTron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted January 19, 2015 Share Posted January 19, 2015 If you (originally) booted the 98 from a choice in BOOT.INI, what you actually did was to chainload a copy of the Win98 bootsector.Obviously the copy of the bootsector needs to be "refreshed" upon partition changes.There is since the dawn of time (we are talking of good ol' NT 4.00 times) a freeware aimed to solve this issue.Meet bootpart:http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm Take some time to understand the (brief) help/instruction text, you should have no issues in running it properly from either XP or 98.If you are not sure about it's usage, ask before running it. jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CamTron Posted January 19, 2015 Author Share Posted January 19, 2015 Bootpart worked fantastic. Thanks! I just extracted the zip file to my Win98 boot floppy, booted it up, and ranBOOTPART WIN95 C:\bootsect.w95 "Windows 98 Second Edition" then rebooted. Now I have a working Windows 98 menu option! So, is bootsect.w95 basically an image of the Windows 9x bootloader? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted January 20, 2015 Share Posted January 20, 2015 Well, the WIN95 switch will create a Win95 bootsector , the WIN98 switch would have created a Win98 one but don't worry the Win95 should be OK as well , though the bootsector will have the "wrong" OEM ID. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/53366-boot-pe-from-hard-drive/?p=401100 https://web.archive.org/web/20070815002154/http://forum.winimage.com/viewtopic.php?t=276 Not that OEM ID will be actually used by *anything*: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/volume-boot-block-oem-name-field.html but still you are using a Windows 95 bootsector to load a Windows 98, and it costs nothing to have the "right" bootsector instead. jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CamTron Posted January 22, 2015 Author Share Posted January 22, 2015 Oh, I didn't realize there was a win98 switch. Should've read bootpart.txt... I ran the program again, but for all practical purposes, the bootsectors are identical. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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