Triple boot Win9x/Win2K/WinXP - By Bruce Chambers

The simplest way I've found to dual boot between Win9x, Win2K & WinXP would be to partition your drive roughly as follows:

C: FAT32 Win9x/Games
D: NTFS Win2K/Serious Apps
E: NTFS WinXP

Adjust the partition sizes according to your actual hard drive(s) size and the amount of space you'd like to allocate to each OS and its applications. You needn't use the FAT32 or NTFS file systems for the Win2K or WinXP OS partitions unless you want to, but this configuration allows you to take full advantage of both OS's partition size, file management, and (for Win2K/XP) security features.

If you like, all of the partitions, as long as they're no larger than 2 Gb, can be FAT16. I don't recommend this, however, as it's terribly wasteful of hard drive space. When I last converted a 2 Gb FAT16 partition to FAT32, I gained an additional 300 Mb of free space. (You results will vary, of course, based upon the types and sizes of files you have on the partition.)

Create the partitions using Win9x's FDISK so you can enable large disk support (FAT32). (No need for 3rd party partitioning utilities/boot managers and their frequent complications.) You need only format the Win9x partition at this time, the Win2K/XP installations can format their partitions as part of the setup routine.

Install Win9x first, being sure to select "C:\Windows" when asked for the default Windows directory. When you subsequently install Win2K/XP, be sure to specify "D:\Winnt" and "E:\Windows," as preferred/applicable) when asked for the default Windows directory, to place them on the other partitions. The Win2K/XP installation routines will automatically set up the Multi-boot menu for you. The default settings for this menu can be readily edited from within Win2K/XP.

This method can be adapted to using 2 physical hard drives by placing the boot partition (C:, which still must be FAT32) and either of the operating systems on the Primary Master hard drive, and the second and/or third operating system on the second hard drive.

It is also possible to have a 4th partition for shared applications, but it would be necessary for such a partition to be formatted in the common file format (FAT32). The applications would also have to be installed into each OS (to ensure proper system file placement and registry updates), one at a time, but the bulk of the program files could be located on this common partition.

I do not, however, actually recommend doing this as, if you were to uninstall such an application from one OS, you would not be able to gracefully uninstall it from the second OS, having already deleted crucial installation data during the first uninstall action.

Just about everything you need to know:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/administration/management/mltiboot.asp

NOTE: The author references NTFS and FAT32 partitions. If you need to be able to access information on the Win2K or Windows XP partitions, from your 9X system, then you will need to install Win2K and NTFS systems to FAT32 partitions. 9X systems cannot read or write to NTFS drives.

Note:  This compilation of information are from various sources.  All credit due to its authors.
XP Support- 01/01/2005 12:42 AM - Home Page WinXP
© Copyright Kelly Theriot MS-MVP(DTS) 2005. All rights reserved.