I have partitioned my disk to a primary partition on which I have
installed win98 and made it active, and an extended partition on which
I intended to install win95 after making it active. This did not
succeed. Neither did installation of DOS 6.2 (which would enable
windows 3.1) succeed.
My question is: Is it possible to have 2 operating systems on the same
disk and if so how is this done, or am I beating a dead horse?

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Request for Question Clarification by smudgy-ga on 17 Jun 2004 22:16 PDT

Hi vaac,

I have a solution that will require purchasing a piece of software.
Are you willing to spend money to accomplish your goal? (The software
is under $50, incidentally.)

Thanks,
smudgy

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Clarification of Question by vaac-ga on 30 Jun 2004 21:22 PDT

The information is very informative but will take more time than I
have now to implement. I will therefore abandon further pursuit of
this question and save it to when I will have more time.

First of all, you don't need to make *every* partition with an OS on
it "active"--in fact, you can't make more than one active. "Active"
doesn't mean "I have a bootable OS on me", it just means "I have a
bootloader on me."
Secondly, you don't have to pay a thing. A multiboot box can be made
with the software (FDISK) that ships with all versions of Windows,
which it sounds like you're already familiar with.
I wrote a tutorial on multibooting. It does not cover every possible
option but it should get you pretty close. My site (newbox.org) is
down right now but here's Google's cache of my page:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:3G7CaSWCNzwJ:www.newbox.org/multiboot.html
I can give you more details if you tell me exactly what OSs you want
to load. If you want Win3.1 and 98 I would do the following:
(note: I've never multibooted with Win3.1, but I have with DOS, which
probably works about the same.)
I'll assume you have a 10 GB disk and want to make a 2 GB partition
for Win3.1 and 8 GB for Win98.
1) Boot to a Win98 boot floppy. Run FDISK. When it asks if you want to
enable large volume support (might not be the exact wording, I'm going
from memory) say "No." (This will create FAT16 partitions that Win3.1
can understand. They are limited to 2 GB but you can get around
that--keep reading.) Remove any partitions you might have. (WARNING:
this will delete all data on every partition on the hard drive.)
Create one primary 2 GB partition (C:). Make it active.
2) Reboot. 
3) Run FDISK again. This time, say "yes" to the large volume support.
Make a secondary (aka extended) partition, then create one logical
disk inside the extended partiton--this will be your 8 GB FAT32
partition for Win98.
4) Reboot again.
5) Issue these commands:
format c: /u
format d: /u
6) Now you should have a formatted 2 GB FAT16 C: drive and a formatted
8 GB FAT32 drive. Install DOS and/or Win3.1 onto the C: drive. Make
sure it all works. (Note: the D: drive will not show up in Win3.1's
File Manager because Win3.1 cannot read FAT32 partitions.)
7) Install Win98 onto the D: drive. (You must use the full version,
not an upgrade CD. An upgrade CD will want to overwrite your Win3.1
installation.) Win98 should automatically put in a boot selector for
you. When you reboot after installing Win98, you should see a menu
asking which you want to boot to. (You'll actually see the menu during
the reboots while setting up win98. Be sure to boot back to the win98
partition to complete setup!)

You may be averse to Linux, the free Unix alternative operating
system, but it does have a boot loader - software that allows multiple
operating systems on the same disk.  Just use a search engine and look
for LILO or "boot loader".