I need a lil help with OS's

Ok- here goes...it is possible to boot 2 different OS's on the same computer without reformatting?
:confused:

Do you mean the same hard drive? It depends, what OS is on there now?

And what OS are you thinking of adding?

Yeah, on the same hard drive...and im thinking of adding Linux (Mandrake or Red Hat)...If I cant, then I guess ill have to drag my other comp out of the closet, lol!!

Oh, whoops missed a question...i have Windows ME on my compaq right now, the other one is an old packard bell...

Okay here is what I know.

1) In order to set up a duel boot, you need to partition the hard drive AND the partition needs to be a PRIMARY partition rather than an extended partition (you can install another OS on an extended partition but than you need a boot disk to boot the OS, Yuck!).

2) It is not easy to accomplish this with Microsoft, that is, if your hard disk isn't already partitioned with at least one other primary, than forget it, you will have to reformat, and even than it can be complicated. Microsoft does not supply a good utility for partitioning, fdisk is useless.

3) The best way to use 2 OS's is to pick up a second hard drive. You have to switch a jumper so that the second hard drive is a primary slave drive rather than a primary master.

4) I have a duel boot, Win2k and Linux RH 7.3. I know the exact process of how to set it up with these OS's however I'm not sure about WinME because I used the Win2k 'Disk Management' feature, to make the second hard disk partition primary, and than I formatted it as NTFS even though when I installed Linux I used DiskDruid and reformatted it as ext3, for some reason it didn't show up at all until I made the drive primary from 'Disk Management'. In other words there are some complications but it does work.

5) Maybe your best bet is just to go ahead and install it on your old computer as the only OS. It can't hurt anything if you still have your Windows OS (ME), because you could always reinstall that if Linux didn't work.

6) Linux works well with old hardware.

Ok, thanks for all of your help!

Don't listen to Troll King , he doesn't know what he is talking about. You can create a second partion on the same harddrive as your win9X is installed on with a third party partitoning(sp) tool as partiton magic or similar. After that you just have to boot from the linix distro and follow the instructions.

echo Barjor...

Don't listen to Troll King..

>Ok- here goes...it is possible to boot 2 different OS's on the
>same computer without reformatting?

You mean without having different partitions? Yes, that is possible. I'm running Windows 98 and QNX at same partition. The QNX OS is stored in the Windows file-system.

OK thanks, ill try that, but ill probably put it on my win95 packard bell :p