Not booting Windows 98, but everything else ok

Spiderkeys

Member
Hello, I've been using EASYBCD for some time now and I've had little problems, and being an O/S freak, it not uncommon for me to have a boot menu of more than 5 Operating Systems on my machines, ranging from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.1.

Yesterday, I got bit daring, and made way for a 15gig patition, and installed Windows 98 along-side already working Windows 2000 on a IDE Hard Drive formatted to FAT32.

I Finally actually got Windows 98SE working, then I thought I had come to the fun part of easily adding it to the boot menu with Windows 2000, and with my SATA Drive with XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

Problem is I create a new entity, I have to select the type as Windows 95/98/ME Entry which I haven't used before, and I only get an option of Automatically Determined, so I have to trust that, I added a couple of entities in case one doesnt work, and also made another entry where I pointed to the Windows 98 Drive in Advanced Settings.

Unfortunately all I either get to the Windows Boot Manager error page with Windows failed to start, File :\NST\AutoNeoGrub0.mbr, etc. etc, or on another setting the GRUB4DOS 0.4.5c page comes up with a blink cursor on grub>

Now before you presume maybe my Windows 98 installation got corrupt, I can still boot Windows 98 anytime by pressing reset, tapping F8, getting to the BIOS boot drive select screen and just selecting the IDE drive, which is a real pain way of changing Operating Systems.

Anyway all my other boot entries from 2000 to Windows 7 are fine, just have to be very different to boot Windows 98, which of course I rather it be a working option on the Boot Menu along side my other entries.

Any suggestions, obviously Windows 9x series has different way of booting, but why it is so difficult for EasyBCD to find?
 
I was using EasyBCD 2.2 on all my O/S's, didn't know there was a 2.3, but just installed it, and tried it, same problem, only can get it to boot to Windows 98 is by changing the boot drive in BIOS.
 
My IDE drive is a bit complicated

It's partitioned in 3 parts.

The First 3GIG is unused and unallocated because Partition Magic finds a bad block in there, so I decided just to isolate it.

The Next partition is Windows 98 (15GIG) which boots just fine by changing to this to a boot drive.

And the last Partition is Windows 2000, which only will boot from the boot menu from the SATA created with EasyBCD

And another fact Windows 98 was installed AFTER Windows 2000, which I ending up moving 2000 from C: to D: drive, just simply moving/copying all files over to the last partition and surprising it still boots.

Will try rebuilding the boot menu then on the IDE drive, hopefully it won't screw up the only way to boot 98 atm, but then again, I don't think I would want it if I had to boot it so differently, so I guess won't hurt to try, and I got nothing to lose anyway...
 
I was using EasyBCD 2.2 on all my O/S's, didn't know there was a 2.3, but just installed it, and tried it, same problem, only can get it to boot to Windows 98 is by changing the boot drive in BIOS.
To verify, you deleted and re-created the entries with 2.3, right? Not just installed and tested?
 
My IDE drive is a bit complicated

The First 3GIG is unused and unallocated because Partition Magic finds a bad block in there, so I decided just to isolate it.

The Next partition is Windows 98 (15GIG) which boots just fine by changing to this to a boot drive.

And the last Partition is Windows 2000, which only will boot from the boot menu created with EasyBCD

And another fact Windows 98 was installed AFTER Windows 2000, which I ending up moving 2000 from C: to D: drive, just simply moving/copying all files over to the last partition and surprising it still boots.

Will try rebuilding the boot menu then on the IDE drive, hopefully it won't screw up the only way to boot 98, but then again, I don't think I would want it if I had to boot it so differently, so I guess won't hurt to try, and I got nothing to lose anyway...
To verify, you deleted and re-created the entries with 2.3, right? Not just installed and tested?
To verify, you deleted and re-created the entries with 2.3, right? Not just installed and tested?

I deleted those older win98 links that didn't work, then recreated a couple more on 2.3, but not the entire boot menu, still same prob, WBM error, or the Grub prompt, it like EasyBCD just doesn't 'see' it.
 
Back
Top