Multi Boot Made Easy!

[homey]

Hi,

Check out this Partition Boot Manager!!
http://www.sadevelopment.com/

I found this wonderful tool when I was on a mission to see how many operating systems I could get onto one computer.

I used PBM to load 76 operating systems onto one hard drive from ASP Linux to Yoper Linux and most everything in between like MS-DOS, XPPRO and WinNT4.

[edit: Actually, I had 63 systems on the first drive and 13 on the second drive which is also the data drive. ]

PBM has a neat way of hiding the partitions on the first drive so every system thinks that it is alone ( In the case of Windows, it thinks it is using the C: partition ). I used a second drive to store my data which is not hidden so that is available to any system that you are currently using.

Just thought that some peoples maybe interested in a really cool way of setting up multi boot systems.

[homey]

While I'm on the subject, check out this site....
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

I put this tool onto a boot floppy disk and used a feature called drive swapping. This allows you to select which hard drive will be the boot drive.

Pretty neat! IMHO

[Magnum Blast]

Do you have any other good multi OS boot managers that you found on your mission? I want to load at least 6 different OSs the next time I wipe my hard drives and I've had trouble finding many boot managers designed for things like that.

[homey]

Yes, I did find some others like XOSL and Ranish...

http://www.xosl.org/

http://www.ranish.com/part/

I use ranish for nice things like copying, erasing or resizing partitions. It also has a boot manager but may not be the best idea for a total newbie! Ranish also has partition hiding but, you need to keep track of it on paper which gets old fast when you want to do a bunch of systems.

XOSL is more user friendly for setting up a few operating systems. This also has the partition hiding feature and a graphical boot manager.

I did not find any boot managers which handled a lot of OS's and was easy to use like the Partition Boot Manager.

[patrickfreen]

I realize this may not be the appropriate place for this question but you seem to know your stuff so I'm hoping you can help me as so far no one seems to know the answer. I have win 2000 on my 1st hard drive and linux alt 2.2 on my second hard drive. They are both on the same ide cable - win 2000 is master. my second ide cable has cdrom and cdrw. Linux runs fine but win 2000 is crawling [5 minbootup, 30 sec to open application] since I installed linux. This is happening with 3 different distros and two different boot loaders. I'm stumped - any help greatly appreciated

[homey]

I have win 2000 on my 1st hard drive and linux alt 2.2 on my second hard drive. They are both on the same ide cable - win 2000 is master. my second ide cable has cdrom and cdrw.

There is nothing wrong with that setup as it is the same for the computer which I'm on now.

You do have a strange problem though as I have never had anything close to that kind of boot up time. I'll do some digging around and see if I can find something.

On my w2k system, I'm running IE 5.5 and Service Pack 2. I also make sure to defrag the drive every now and then.


One to be aware of !!!!

Don't try to create the linux partitions from within Windows. If you did that, I would recommend that you delete them and use the linux install program to create the linux partitions.

[patrickfreen]

thanks for replying - no linux files on 1st hard drive only ntfs - also using sp2 and 1e 5.5 - cannot figure out this problem - again any help appreciated.

[homey]

Does your boot loader use the MBR as mine does?

[patrickfreen]

mbr is on my primary hard drive along with win 2000

[homey]

Sorry, I can't think of anything right off.

[patrickfreen]

Homey- got it fixed - it was Norton anti virus - I uninstalled it and now everything works ok - now I'm running Mcafee - no problem so far. In addition I had one jumper set wrong but still the problem didn't go away completely till I dumped Norton - Maybe if linux was installed before Nav it might have viewed it differently. again thanks for your help - Regards - Pat Reen

[andysimmons]

Geez dude, I don't even think I have 73 applications on CD...let alone 73 OSes on my computer.