James, I'm not sure if you really got all your partitions right. The most common configuration is as follows.
You can have up to three primary partitions and one logical partition. Each primary partition can be made "active" or "bootable" (which means the same thing). Most operating systems must be installed on a primary partition. To avoid conflicts and problems the best idea is to install each operating system on a dedicated partition. Before booting you should make one primary partition active (eg. the one with FreeDOS) and all remaining primary partitions "hidden". As far as logical partition is concerned (drives D to Z) FreeDOS won't "see" any NTFS drives. Here is example of how the hard drive could look before you boot to Windows XP: - Drive C, NTFS, primary, active, Windows XP - Drive -, NTFS, primary, hidden, Windows 2000 - Drive -, FAT32, primary, hidden, FreeDOS - Drive D, NTFS, logical, visible to XP & 2000, not visible to FreeDOS - Drive E, NTFS, logical, visible to XP & 2000, not visible to FreeDOS - Drive F, FAT32, logical, visible to XP, 2000 and FreeDOS Now, to boot to FreeDOS you would have to use the boot manager and get the following: - Drive -, NTFS, primary, hidden, Windows XP - Drive -, NTFS, primary, hidden, Windows 2000 - Drive C, FAT32, primary, active, FreeDOS - Drive -, NTFS, logical, visible to XP & 2000, not visible to FreeDOS - Drive -, NTFS, logical, visible to XP & 2000, not visible to FreeDOS - Drive D, FAT32, logical, visible to XP, 2000 and FreeDOS You could consider creating this extra Fat32 logical drive (F under XP, D under FreeDOS) to easily transfer files between XP and FreeDOS and also for installing DOS applications (you can then defrag them from XP). Boot Manager: "grub4dos" is often mentioned on this forum but I don't have the link. I use this freebie and it works great: http://www.boot-us.com/ Once you get everything running in this basic configuration then you can try to experiment installing two OSes on the same primary partition but that's when things get much more complicated. Lester _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
