E-machines 550r dual Hard Drives

[E-monster550r]

I have a e-machines 550r. Factory hard drive with xp. Second hard drive stolen from a compaq presario 5150, running windows 98. It was difficult to get it to boot the compaq hard drive, had trouble with the on board sound for the compaq, but that is for a different thread. Anyway, I can only switch to xp by opening the case and unplugging the 98 drive. Is the any way to switch the operating system with unplugging the drive?

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If you want to dual boot Windows XP and 98, you'll have to make Windows XP the primary boot volume and modify boot.ini to add an entry for Windows 98.

Overview of the Boot.ini File - Windows drivers

The Boot.ini file is a text file that contains the boot options for computers with BIOS firmware running NT-based operating system prior to Windows Vista. It is located at the root of the system partition, typically c:\Boot.ini.

learn.microsoft.com

There are other ways of dual booting, but that's the easiest with existing Windows installs.