Win2000 upgrade question

[GT98]

well when Win2000 comes out I'll most likely get the upgrade for Win98. My question is that I want to duel boot Win98 and 2000 till 2000 gets all of its bugs fixed and what not. I'm not sure if I just get the upgrade I'll be able to do that.
Scott


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Abit BH6 with a P3-450@558,128mb RAM,G400 MAX,SB Live!, Optiquest V95 19in montor, Asus 40x CD-ROM, Aopen 5x DVD-ROM, 2x CDR, WD 13.6 GB HD,SupraMax 56k modem

[paulcs]

I could be wrong, but odds are the W2K upgrade will do one or two things:

The first and most likely will be to check your hard drive for qualifying software. It will detect Windows 98 on your C Drive, and you will pass the compliance check.

If that doesn't work, it will ask you to insert a CD with qualifying software. At this point, you will insert your Windows 98 CD, and you will pass the compliance check.

The dual boot, I think, is a good idea.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Jammrock]

GT98,

You may not have read any of my previous posts on Win2k, but I have had nothing but troubles with it. There are a lot of people who love and charish Win2k, but I am not one of them. To this day, I have NEVER been able to get all my hardware to properly work on Win2k, and trust me, I have spent several hours working on it.

If you plan on running Win2k on your machine once it comes out, DUAL BOOT! Be careful though, there are a few known issues with dual booting to win98, which I found out the hard way. If the NTFS partition for Win2k (and Win2k MUST be installed on an NTFS 5.0 partition) is on a logical drive/partition, Win98 will see the drive as bad and try to 'fix' it. The security features of the partition will block win98 from doing this, thus locking up the computer and blocking you from booting into win98. This little bug may have been fixed in the final build, but as of RC-2/3 it is still there. There are 2 ways of getting around this:

1) Get Partition Magic (5.0 just came out) and create a second primary partition (NTFS) and install Win2k to the partition. The installer will convert the partition and keep it as a primary so Win98 will ingore it.

2) Get TweakUI for Win98. Install and go to the applet in Control Panel. Go to the Boot tab and select the option to NEVER run Scandisk at boot.

Also, before you install Win2k, download ALL the manufacture drivers for Win2k. Some don't have any available and many are on the CD, but get as many as you can. The number one troublemaker for new M$ OS's are driver related.

Besides that you shouldn't have too many issues. It will take a while to get used to using Win2k, but supposedly its worth it...

Jammrock

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PIII 450@504, 256 MB RAM, 35 GB total w/ WD Experts, Abit UDMA 66 controller, CL 6x DVD, PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW (my newest toy), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, LinkSys Etherfast 10/100, DSI 56k modem, Addtronics 6896A Case w/ a crap load of fans and Dynmat noise dampening, MAG DX715T monitor.

Hi, my name is Jammrock. I'm a computer phreak and an EverCrack addict.

[LAMFDTK]

I hve a quick one on this ...

Get a hard drive caddy and another Hard drive.
I have 5 harddrives that I swapp out in a caddy depending on what I'm doing. Its easy and you won't end up screwing your primary O/S up with a bone-head mistake..

Why does everyone want NT5 (w2k) I have had good results on RC2 But have not spent too much time tweaking with it,,,, Good luck!

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PIII-450@504, 128 HDSRAM, Asus P3BF, G400/32, SBLive!,Brand stinkin' new Sony G400 19", (no Dual head) Nokia 447Xi 17",AOPEN DVD-1040 10x slot,PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW, and some fish,

[GT98]

its not as much as wanting Win2K, its just that I want to learn it for future possible jobs. I really hate NT4.0 and Win2K looks like a huge improvment in ease of doing things in compairson. I find that learn better if I have to deal with it at home then at work, since theres aways pressure to get the work done as quick as possible.

Scott


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Abit BH6 with a P3-450@558,128mb RAM,G400 MAX,SB Live!, Optiquest V95 19in montor, Asus 40x CD-ROM, Aopen 5x DVD-ROM, 2x CDR, WD 13.6 GB HD,SupraMax 56k modem

[LAMFDTK]

Same reason that I'm on it right now...learning to surf while at work...on W2K

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PIII-450@504, 128 HDSRAM, Asus P3BF, G400/32, SBLive!,Brand stinkin' new Sony G400 19", (no Dual head) Nokia 447Xi 17",AOPEN DVD-1040 10x slot,PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW, and some fish,

[Guyver]

LAMFDTK...

I do almost the same thing, except I use SCSI and control through the SCSI bios which drive I boot from. Has worked well so far. I always give an OS the entire drive to play with....

Guyv

[Gurm]

Jammrock:

You're COMPLETELY confused. No offense intended, but...

...I have had nothing but troubles with it. There are a lot of people who love and charish Win2k, but I am not one of them. To this day, I have NEVER been able to get all my hardware to properly work on Win2k, and trust me, I have spent several hours working on it.

Ok, a new OS - and I mean pretty entirely new, from the ground up sort of new... and you wrote it off after a few hours of playing with a buggy beta? Tsk tsk.

If you plan on running Win2k on your machine once it comes out, DUAL BOOT!

This I concur with, simply because Win2k WILL NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES RUN ALL OF YOUR GAMES. The shouting here is intended to demonstrate to those folks out there (not yourself of course) that presume that the inclusion of DX7 makes Win2k a gaming platform. Heh.

Be careful though, there are a few known issues with dual booting to win98, which I found out the hard way.

Umm... no there aren't.

If the NTFS partition for Win2k (and Win2k MUST be installed on an NTFS 5.0 partition) <SNIP>

Ok, wrong. Win2k will install on the following types of partitions:

- FAT
- FAT32
- NTFS

If you install onto NTFS it will upgrade NTFS to NTFS5.

is on a logical drive/partition, Win98 will see the drive as bad and try to 'fix' it. The security features of the partition will block win98 from doing this, thus locking up the computer and blocking you from booting into win98.

I have NEVER seen this "bug". I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but that I've never seen it. On my system, Win98 sees the NTFS5 partitions as "non-dos", and leaves them the hell alone like it should.

This little bug may have been fixed in the final build, but as of RC-2/3 it is still there.

Well, not very much about the file system has changed since RC2, and NOTHING about the filesystem has changed since RC3. So if this bug did exist then it would still exist now... but it doesn't.

There are 2 ways of getting around this:

1) Get Partition Magic (5.0 just came out) and create a second primary partition (NTFS) and install Win2k to the partition. The installer will convert the partition and keep it as a primary so Win98 will ingore it.

Ok, or you could just let the NT installer do this. The only reason to use Partition Magic (not that it isn't a GREAT program) is if you have lots of important data that you can't afford to lose. Otherwise, I'd reformat, re-fdisk, etc. etc. NOW, while you still can. ALWAYS install fresh if you can.

2) Get TweakUI for Win98. Install and go to the applet in Control Panel. Go to the Boot tab and select the option to NEVER run Scandisk at boot.

That's stupid. First of all, you ought to be using Norton Disk Doctor instead of Scandisk. BUT, if you haven't sprung for Norton, it doesn't matter - scandisk has no problem with NTFS partitions under normal circumstances.

Also, before you install Win2k, download ALL the manufacture drivers for Win2k. Some don't have any available and many are on the CD, but get as many as you can. The number one troublemaker for new M$ OS's are driver related.

I half-agree with this. Lots of issues are driver related. However, a fairly recent machine will have 100% native driver support under Win2k. The only pieces of equipment in my machine that weren't recognized off the bat were my G400 and my Winnov VidCap board... both of which have Win2k drivers that are fully installable after the fact.

Besides that you shouldn't have too many issues. It will take a while to get used to using Win2k, but supposedly its worth it...

Now, that's another dumb thing to say. It takes a while to get used to working with esoteric stuff in Win2k. But as far as running programs with it... it's EXACTLY the same, just different eye candy (and a few menus were moved).

*sigh*

Sorry to sound pretty condescending in this post. But the point is that Win2k, in any Post-RC2 incarnation, is close to perfect if you have compatible hardware. If you have all the problems you've talked about above, you have hardware issues, not Win2k issues.

- Gurm


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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[DentyCracker]

Right now I'm running Win2k Server RC-2 (build 2128) on a 233 MHz MMX Pentium on a PCCHIPS TX-Pro-II, Diamond Stealth Video DRAM(S3 Trio 765), Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI, Kingston KNE20TX NIC, Jaton Rockwell V.90 ISAPNP modem, 10 GB IBM 5400 RPM HD , listening to Michael Jackson MegaMix.mp3 on Sonique 1.30.5, with that cool tornado vis.
It is now a dual boot system (was a quadruple boot linux beOS win98 win2k system but I needed space) with both OSes on the same partition. I've reinstalled both win98 and win2k without any problem. Of course being a little experienced will help me not to do crap on installing win2k like changing filesystem type to ntfs hehe.
And by the way win2k supported the onboard SiS 5597 vga and Cmedia 8330 sound-pro as well

[Jammrock]

Gurm,

I wrote what I have experienced, but don't hate me because I am not a good writer:

1) I have been working with Win2K since Beta 3, currently have RC-3 and will shortly get the final release, and for more than just a few hours. I have spent 20+ hours on my home machine alone, not including testing and studying it at the office (another 40+ hours). I have worked on several different machines and configurations, but the only ones that work well right off the bat are worksations. Gaming machine and 'non-standard' machines usually take some work.

2) At the time I wrote I thought you could only install Win2K on an NTFS 5 partition. I stand corrected.

3) There have been issues with dual booting, because I have run into them, personally. No second hand stories from the web. And it has happened to me more than once and can be duplicated (I have done that, too). I threw that out there for people who may run into the same problem.

4) Scandisk is made by Symntec (at least it used to be. In the DOS days it used to be called ScanDisk by Symantec, just like Win2K's scandisk was written by another company...Excutive Software or something like that), Norton SpeedDisk is just a fancier version. And by default Win98 will check for bad partitions and run scandisk if any bad parts are found, unless you disable the feature. There are lots of ways to do this, but TweakUI is easiest. That protion was put in there for people who end up having the same trouble I did.

5)

quote:
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Besides that you shouldn't have too many issues. It will take a while to get used to using Win2k, but supposedly its worth it...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, that's another dumb thing to say. It takes a while to get used to working with esoteric stuff in Win2k. But as far as running programs with it... it's EXACTLY the same, just different eye candy (and a few menus were moved).

I was commenting on Win2k as a whole, like the administrative and networking aspects, not just running programs. I am well aware that installing and running programs are the same (assuming they are Win2k compatible), but there have been a lot more changes between NT 4 and Win2K than eye candy and menues. To name a few changes: the entire kernel was re-written, a newer file system was created, the networking system was re-vamped (Active Directories vs. Domains), most of the server tools were re-written and modified, Plug 'n' Pray, USB, Firewire, hot swap PC card and DVD (to name a few) support was added, the administrative tools were completely changed, a device manager was added, hardware finder was added, new administrative features were added and yes new eye candy and menues was added. I do not consider this mere 'esoteric stuff'. True, installing and running software is pretty much the same, but administrating Win2k is a whole other ball game.

NOTE: I am currently using a Win2k machine, a Dell workstation, at work. Since it uses very common hardware that is natively supported in Win2k it is working well. So far I have not had any crashes and no major troubles. Performance is a bit laggish, but that is expected. Like I said, if you can get your hardware up and running Win2k is said to be worth it, and so far it is. Now whether I can get my home machine working under Win2k is an entirely other beast.

Jammrock

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PIII 450@504, 256 MB RAM, 35 GB total w/ WD Experts, Abit UDMA 66 controller, CL 6x DVD, PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW (my newest toy), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, LinkSys Etherfast 10/100, DSI 56k modem, Addtronics 6896A Case w/ a crap load of fans and Dynmat noise dampening, MAG DX715T monitor.

Hi, my name is Jammrock. I'm a computer phreak and an EverCrack addict.

[Gurm]

Jammrock,

Ok, I may have been a little harsh. Some thoughts:

1. I'm still unaware of the scandisk bug. I just ran scandisk, to check this theory, and told it to scan all my drives, including the one with an NTFS5 partition on it... and it was fine with it. Norton Disc Doctor warned me that I had a non-dos partition in the report, but didn't regard it as an error. So... I dunno what it is about your system that causes that to happen! It would be interesting to find out.

2. The machine I currently have running Win2k (workstation) is as follows:

Asus P3B-F
2*128 CL3 PC100 DIMM
P3-500 (not overclocked)
G400 Vanilla DH Retail
Promise Ultra66 Controller
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Controller
SCSI DVD-3 Drive
SCSI 4x4x16 Burner
SCSI Scanner
SCSI External 250MB ZIP
2*13GB IBM 7200RPM U66 Drives
1*10GB IBM 5400RPM U33 Drive
1*13GM WD 7200RPM U66 Drive
1*9GB Seagate Medalist UW SCSI Drive
SB Live!
MS Natural Keyboard Pro with Funky Buttons (TM)
MS Intellimouse
Winnov Videum PCI vidcap board
3Com 10/100 PCI NIC
Viewsonic GT775
Palm Pilot
Gravis XTerminator Pad
HP Deskjet 672C

And I've got every single piece of equipment running, with drivers installed, and they all work better than they did under Win98. No sweat. And it wasn't even a hassle - ran through setup, installed some drivers, and bingo!

So of course your mileage may vary. *shrug* but I think some of your problems are very unusual still.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[The Rock]

I agree with everything Gurm said; this OS rocks, and has great built-in driver support for lots of devices. I had a few sound glitches with my SB128, but since I bought an SB Live, I haven't had a problem. In almost a month, it's only locked me up once. And guess what I was doing at the time: playing FreeCell. Just for fun, I tried task-switching between IRC on Unreal Tournament, ICQ, Winamp, IE5 and Agent, and it worked flawlessly. The next day it locks when playing FreeCell; oh the irony. I do recommend the dual-boot though; just in case. Like Gurm said, best off going with a fresh Fdisk / Format though. Never hurts.

GT98:

If you hate NT4, you aren't gonna like Windows 2000 much. It IS NT5 after all.

The Rock

[paulcs]

Just an FYI, and I hope someone else didn't post it here and I missed it, there is a TweakUI inf available for W2K. I haven't tinkered with it extensively, but it appears to work fine with RC2.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Jammrock]

Gurm,

Yeah, it was a wierd bug, but I got it 2 or 3 times while installing Win2k RC-2. The only way I got around it was by creating an NTFS in Partition Magic and installing to it. I am going to get a copy of Win2k Pro free at some M$ seminar later this month, so I will try it at home once I get the final release. I haven't actually played with it at home much lately since everytime I touch my computer Everquest is running BTW, I could boot into Win2k fine, but I wasn't able to boot into Win98 (don't know if you picked that up).

Hardware that I could not (or still cannot) get to work:

DSI 3660 56k x2 modem (picked up some hints on how to do it, but haven't gotten around to it yet).
CL Dxr3 MPEG2 decoder (Win2k drivers weren't out for the Hollywood+ last time I toyed with Win2k at home).
Various Network cards: Kingston LNE40BTE, Addtron something...
Abit Hot Rod 66 controller (I think I figured this one out, again no time to test it, curse EQ).
Had some trouble with older video cards, but eventually got them working with hacked drivers (Voodoo 3 in particular).

As you can see, my Internet and network hardware has been the biggest problem. Now since Win2k is supposed to be a NetOS, this really grinded on my nerves. I still can't get my modem to work, but my new LinkSYS NIC should work without a hitch.

Now that I have been using Win2k in a normal environment, on a stable machine and with working hardware, it is growing on me. I still dislike the admin setup. It is too slow (i.e. takes forever to load), too spread out (a little worse than NT 4 IMHO) and not as intuitive as NT 4 was. It will just take some getting used to, I suppose, but for now it is annoying.

Final note: IMO I think Win2k is a good OS. Once driver support gets better and I get used to the setup quirks I am sure my Win98 parition will sit dormant.

The other major quirk I have with the OS is that is defines the term BLOATWARE. My WINNT folders have been around 500-700 MB and the i386 folder comes in at 200 MB. That is nearly a GB just for the OS and the install files. It uses 100 MB RAM, meaning it is a major resource hog (NT 4 on the same machine used 40-60 MB RAM). This is not much of an issue for me, but some people who try and install Win2k on their Pentium 200's with 64 MB RAM are going to be in shock when they try and run Win2k.

That's all I have to say about that...

Jammrock

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PIII 450@504, 256 MB RAM, 35 GB total w/ WD Experts, Abit UDMA 66 controller, CL 6x DVD, PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW (my newest toy), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, LinkSys Etherfast 10/100, DSI 56k modem, Addtronics 6896A Case w/ a crap load of fans and Dynmat noise dampening, MAG DX715T monitor.

Hi, my name is Jammrock. I'm a computer phreak and an EverCrack addict.