Windows XP workaround

[Fred Drake]

I gave up trying to get FMS to work with XP. What
I did was to use a old hard drive and make a dual
boot system. I cut the 5v+ wire to the "C" drive
of the orginal harddrive and installed a small single pole switch. I then installed my old copy of W98 on the other harddrive along with FMS. When the switch is open the computer does not see the
orignal harddrive and boots from the new one.
When the switch is closed it boots normally to XP
and sees the new harddrive as "D"

[sanjay]

wow. Thats pretty drastic!

Why did you not just install xp and w98 side by side with a dual boot configuration?

[Fred Drake]

I did this for two reasons. One I like to turn the computer
on and leave the room (get coffee), when I return the browser is loaded and I am connected to my ISP. The second is by this method I can shield my main harddrive from any
virus that might slip through. If the computer doesn't recongise the harddrive it wont' write to it.

[sanjay]

well the coffee problem can be solved easily by installing a small utility called bootchooser (or maybe its called oschooser) that works in a multiple boot setup and sets the selected os as the default to boot to before rebooting the machine so you can choose w98 and reboot and get your coffee going.

The virus issue of course is a real one but a good anti virus program like Norton installed on both hard disks should prevent infections.

In your setup your main boot os could still get infected in any case so an antivirus would still be required.

[Fred Drake]

Sanjay---true, however the only thing I keep of the online
drive is the browser,e-mail, and of course FMS. They are
easily reloaded after a re-format. This was not as hard to
do as described. I have at least 3 extra harddrives laying
around. The switch and soldering took only about 10min. It
took longer to re-install W98. Besides I like to try different things. I have a copy of PartitionMagic that would
allow me to do mulit-boots, but that would be too easy:}

[Isaac]

Fred,
I use a different schema for doing this hard drive swap, without any hardware modifications:

Install your hard drive with FMS as master in the secondary controller. When you want to boot by the FMS drive, just disable the primary master in BIOS setup and reboot. As the primary master is not available, the computer will boot by the secondary master wich becomes C:

I think this schema is better, because you can have both the drives active at same time if you want.
Besides, this switch thing appears to be dangerous to the hardware.

Isaac