7.5 Special Installations
7.5.3 Dual boot Windows 9x/Windows NT 4/Windows 2000
Windows 2000 can be set up to dual boot with Windows 98 operating systems. This option provides the choice to boot up into either a Windows 2000 or a Windows 98 environment. If the computer system is to be dual booted, there will be a menu offering choices of different operating systems to use during start up. To dual boot the system, do a fresh install of Windows 98 before installing Windows 2000.

It is important to keep in mind that if the system is set up as dual boot, none of the applications that are installed in the other operating system partition can be used. If the same application needs to be used in both operating systems, it will need to be installed twice, once for each operating system.

Additionally, if the operating systems have incompatible file systems, two separate partitions can be created and the operating systems can be installed on each partition. Alternatively, logical drives can be created and the two operating systems can be installed on the separate logical drives. However, it must be understood that if the hard drive is formatted with NTFS, the Windows 98 operating system will not be able to read files in the Windows 2000 NTFS partition. Microsoft recommends that if the computer is set up to dual boot with Windows 98 and 2000, both partitions be formatted with the FAT file system. Windows 2000 can operate with the FAT file system and files in the other partition can be read.