Installing win98 twice on one system

[Ron]

How do I install win98 on second hard drive of pc?
Dad-in-law owns (shit-hot) pc lent to us and I want to install win 98 on 2nd hdd so I can have all the crap removed, use mozilla, no findfast etc but am not allowed to change 'primary install'. When I tried, win98 automatically reinstalled to orig. location.
Alternatively, can I run win 3.1x and are updates/pluginspatches etc available so I can use uptodate software?

[Centurian]

Hey Ron,

Windows is built to install on C: Drive. It further assumes it is the ONLY OS on the computer. Unfortunately that makes it nearly impossible to install twice to the best of my knowledge. The only way I know of to install is twice is to change the slave/master setting on the hard drives. Hopefully someone else can offer you a better solution than that but I have no other suggestions.

Later
Centurian

[voidmain]

Shit, I've installed it twice on my computer and had both copies running at the same time, along with a copy of Win2K server, and two copies of Solaris, all running at the same time (under Linux and VMware of course).  But if you want to run the crap all by itself, swap master/slave as you suggest and the existing C: will become D: and install on the new drive as C: (might actually want to completely remove the original drive, and then install it as slave after the install).  But I would rather just format both of them and install Linux then if I wanted to run Microslop I would install it under a virtual machine....

[Calum]

My sister did exactly that. she had a 1.2 Gb drive with 1/4 bad sectors, with win98 1st ed installed, bought a spanking new 40 Gb Seagate hard drive and replaced the original drive, installing win98 se on the new drive.
When it started doing the Seagate thing of springing up mystery bad sectors all over the place, it became par for the course for her to switch the plugs around when the situation got desperate and use the other hard drive using the old OS.
The only reason she doesn't have both plugged in at the same time is due to an old AT board, and a 386 power supply, apparently, but it is possible once you have installed the OSs on the 2 drives, both as C:/ drives, seperately.

[voidmain]

Actually now that I think about it again, you *can* do this with several Boot Managers and I have done it several times in the past.  OS/2's boot manager would allow you to install Win95/Win98 on two different disks. OS/2's boot manager used to be included as the Partition Magic boot manager.  Not sure it the new Partition Magic boot manager will work or not.  It does this by changing a single byte in the partition table from "FAT" or "FAT32" to "HIDDEN".  Then you can install on the second drive since it will see no partition on the first drive.  Then whichever one you select on the boot menu, it will hide the other using the method I mention.  Now you can't access data from both at the same time using this method.

[Calum]

Now, the thing about BootMagic, is that it comes free with PartitionMagic. the good news about that is, you get it free even if you only get the crippled demo version of PartitionMagic. So, if you try out Partmagic from a cover CD, you get BootMagic for free, end of story.
To me, it seemed simple to use and i would recommend trying it, if using Windows, because it's easy to uninstall if you have problems (which i didn't, but i like to check how easy an uninstall is for anything).

[voidmain]

Hey Ron, here's another boot loader link with a review of several that will do what you want:

http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0125.boot.html