Oh I see so this more like greed and Microsoft monopoly
Well that makes sense

"There are certain checks that are performed during each boot that must match the record from the original installation"
What I would be interested in knowing is when are those checks made in a dual boot windows 98/xp system ?
Is it before or after the boot menu ?

A multi-boot boot manager starts before any OS starts, that's how it can give you the option of multi booting. An OS can do nothing until it is initiated.

As any Operating System boots, it needs the info from the BIOS and other components, so it knows how to communicate with the hardware.

"A multi-boot boot manager starts before any OS starts, that's how it can give you the option of multi booting. An OS can do nothing until it is initiated."

That's what I was thinking

Does that apply to the xp boot manager also or is that different?
If it does can I assume then that in a dual boot windows 98/xp if I changed the motherboard that windows 98 will still work while xp will not ?

That is the most likely outcome. If you read the Sysprep (for XP) link in an earlier post you may be able to get it to work.

I was able to verify it this morning
I used the hard disk from my Toshiba laptop which has a dual boot windows 98/xp and connected it to my pc which has an AMD based cpu at 1Ghz
The only glitch I observed when booting windows 98 was something about emm386 mot being active bur after a few seconds it continued to load and then started detecting the new hardware
On the windows xp side I didn't get too far It started loading and stopped at the end of the black screen with the white progress bar and then it just hangs there I rebooted and selected safe mode with command prompt and I was able to see the drivers being loaded The last driver was agp440.sys at which point
it would just hang there

So I think I will always set up my hard drive to dual boot windows 98/xp just to eliminate the hassle of repairing xp in case I need to swap the hard drive into a new pc that way I am up and running in no time then fix xp later on
This was a good information for me to know about xp
Thanks to all that replied

Not a bad idea, but Win98 can not read NTFS formatted drives. Most likely your XP install is formatted as NTFS. XP can be either FAT32 or NTFS. XP Install defaults to NTFS and NTFS is preferred as a more stable file system, so I would always recommend you install XP this way.
Without a third party tool you will not be able to access a NTFS formatted partition. There are tools available just do a search.

If you're going to go through all that, why not just make regular backups?
Then WHEN if fails (hard drives are mechanical, so if it doesn't fail from software corruption, it Will have a mechanical failure at some point) you can just restore and be back up quickly. Without needing to figure out what went wrong and how to repair it.

I knew about the NTFS / fat32 versions so that's why I installed xp on a fat32 partition on the laptop in case I need some file I can download it from the net and then copy it to xp or the other way to save my data before reformating or reinstalling xp
I have NTFS now on the pc and I don't notice any difference
This thing about not being able to swap hard drive with xp to a new computer
was new information for me. At least I found out about it now and prepare ahead of time

The backup I heard about it but I haven't done it and I am not sure how it's going to help if it's a mechanical failure of the hard drive