If you've been thinking about switching to WindowsXP and hope to avoid problems by setting up a dual-boot system with your old OS and WinXP, you might need to think again. I ended up losing my entire drive and having to do a disk reformat and reinstall, but I'm getting ahead of myself...

I wanted to install WinXP Home Edition on the Compaq 1650 laptop that I use for wireless client testing, but install it in a dual-boot mode so that I could switch between it and my existing Win98SE installation. Everything I'd read said that WinXP didn't play well with multiple-OS/boot manager programs like Partition Commander (which I normally would have used). So I decided to follow the recommendations of those who had been down this path before me and let WinXP handle the disk partitioning and boot management.

After a relatively uneventful installation, my laptop was set up to dual-boot either my old Win98SE installation... which had plenty of programs and data in it... and a clean installation of WinXP Home, with no applications added. Note that I did not perform an upgrade of my Win98SE install, but installed WinXP Home in its own disk partition, which I let it create.

All worked well for a few days, with the dual-boot capability working fine, except for an occasional scrambling of the OS selection screen, which I could clear with a reboot. But a few days before Christmas, I mistakenly booted the system into XP one morning, then realized my error and restarted XP so that I could get back to the boot menu and select Win98. But this time, instead of the OS selection boot menu, I was greeted by the message "NTLDR is Missing. Press any key to restart." Of course, pressing any key just kept getting me back to the same message, so I was stuck with a dead laptop for the remainder of my Christmas travels.

After I returned home, a this Microsoft Support article describes the problem as occuring when you try to install XP over Win95, 98, or Me, my experience showed me that you can also get the problem on a dual-boot installation. Following the instructions in the Microsoft article got me back to the point where I was able to get the dual-boot menu and successfully boot into XP. But when I tried to boot into Win98SE, the boot would halt in a DOS screen. I tried running Scandisk and letting it fix a number of problems, but the damage was done. I ended up having to reformat the disk and do a clean install.

The reformatting process wasn't easy, by the way! The FDISK utility on my Win98 Rescue Disk apparently couldn't handle the combination of FAT32 and NTFS (with logical partitioning) partitions that the XP installer had created, and sent me into a loop where I couldn't delete either the Win98 or XP partitions. I had to install my trusty copy of Partition Commander, and use it to delete all the partitions and get back to the point where I could use the DOS FDISK and FORMAT commands to prepare my hard drive for Win98SE reinstallation.

So I guess my plans to use WinXP for wireless product testing are on hold until I can get hold of a laptop with XP already on it. For now, I'll be sticking with Win98SE.