Technical question on a dual-boot system

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I have an older windows 98/XP dual boot system. Baldur's Gate II has been installed on the 98 side since before it was a dual boot system.

I've been considering finally giving TuTu or Trilogy a try. I'll probably put it on the XP side. Will I first need to reinstall BG & BG2 on the XP side to do so?

If so, could I get away with installing the games to the same place on the C drive so I don't waste hard drive space (C drive is Windows 98SE, D Drive is XP Professional. With some programs that work in both OSes you can save space by installing them to cprogram files in 98, then reboot to XP and install them again to Cprogram files instead of dprogram files, thus there is only one copy of the program instead of two. Saves HD space, and I only have 40gb on each drive) ?

Further, can I back up my override folder and the files in the main directory so I can save time and not have to reinstall all my mods, and once I reinstall to get the registry configured right, simply overwrite the files to restore my mod setup as well as the patches?

Just thoughts.

 

You can use it in both OSes, but unless you do some fancy tricks, it has to have the same path on both systems.
Can't help you with the other questions.

 

What do you mean "fancy tricks"? For most programs, the procedure would be
1. Install in Windows 98
2. reboot into XP
2. Install in XP specifying the same location as in Windows 98 (Cprogram files\black isle\BGII - SoA\ instead of using the default on the D drive)
3. Patch

My question was, does this work with Baldur's Gate II, and secondly, since it is already fully installed and fully patched (and modded) on one OS, but not installed at all on the other, do I have to install Throne of Bhaal, or is there a shortcut I can take to get it working without having to reboot into Windows 98?
I'm spending most of my time in XP these days due to the incompatibility of Firefox with Windows 98SE (last version was 2.0.20). Up until now I'd just reboot to the OS with the games installed.

 

By fancy tricks I mean writing a launcher that edits baldur.ini at each start and adjust the path. It's required if the game has different paths on both OSes, paths stored in baldur.ini have to be correct or the game won't run. For this reason installing on XP can break the existing 98 version.

For the rest of the post I assume that the game has the same path on both OSes or that you wrote the launcher.

You can have a simpler installation procedure, once the game files are present, you don't need any installation. So installing on 1 OS is enough. There's 1 minor 'but' though. I think that the launching menu won't run, IIRC it needs the registry entries set by the installer. But it's faster to use BGMain.exe to launch the game directly anyway and I can attest that it works. I reinstalled my Windows several times since the last time I installed BG because I keep it archived on HDD. Extracting an archive and fixing baldur.ini is much faster than juggling CDs.

 

As it stands, the situation is like this.
I installed Baldur's Gate II (and all the other Infinity Engine games) on Windows 98SE many years ago. They have been patched and modded. Nothing has been done with XP at this point, I'm making preparations. I haven't written anything as my most up to date programming skills consist of two semesters of ANSI C/C++ (first semester C, second semester C++) back when Visual Studio 6.0 was current, and one semester of Visual BASIC 6. Unless you count knowledge of making batch files, which hasn't changed much since MS-DOS 3.30 although I use it a heck of a lot more often than C or BASIC (haven't done anything in C except a 'Hello World' to test GCC on Linux in about a decade).

I'm finding it increasingly inconvenient to reboot into 98 to play, so I want to install it on the XP side. If possible, I'd like to avoid having two copies of the game (although I'm considering giving Trilogy a try, so that might be a moot point), hence my question on the procedure to do so.

As far as I'm concerned, this IS a "fancy trick", as the normal way to do things is to have a copy installed for Windows 98SE on the C drive, and a copy installed for XP on the D drive. I'm asking if I can point the installer back to the C drive and play out of the same folder on both machines, use the same saved games (big reason) and not have any trouble.

 

The paths have to be the same or have to be corrected at each startup, it's required and sufficient to have the game working, with the likely exception of the already mentioned launcher.
You could also play some tricks with hardlinks / softlinks. I don't see another solution.

ADDED:
There's also subst. You could have them both on Z: or whatever without changing the physical location of files.