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Windows 2000 (and probably earlier) adds OS/2 to boot.ini

Posted: 05 Apr 2021, 05:11
by win32
After my win2k install on my ThinkPad T41 fell apart, I reinstalled after installing OS/2 Warp 4.52 on a FAT16 partition. NTLDR picked up on OS/2 and added it to the boot menu. Both OSes are working well.

Windows 2000's multi-booting documentation only mentions DOS, NT 4.0 (though NT 3.51 is also known to work with Windows 2000 NTLDR) and Windows 9x.

However, the time-out in boot.ini was set to one second instead of the usual 30.

Windows 2000 (and probably earlier) adds OS/2 to boot.ini

Posted: 06 Apr 2021, 03:49
by win32
Further testing resulted in another reinstall of win2k. I found out some more things:

Perhaps the one-second timeout was a fluke, as the next install produced a standard 30-second timeout.
The OS/2 LVM also causes Windows 2000 to freak out if changes are committed through it (moving the pagefile to the OS/2 partition, creating a rump winnt and program files on it as well, and failing to reach explorer on boot, sometimes generating an error about a missing paging file), while disk management with Windows tools causes no issues.