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.