VOGONS


First post, by FeedingDragon

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Putting together what I call my compatibility system. That is, an older system with ISA slots for my DOS mode cards. I plan to have it dual boot with DOS 6.22/win3.1 and Win98. Originally, it had just booted to Win98, but I ran into a couple of issues with some of my older games. The problem I'm running into is finding a boot manager that I can put on my install CD, which has all the necessary files to install everything except the OS files themselves (on separate disks, CD's.) Drivers, format tools, etc... Back in the day, my brother-in-law was all hot and bothered about a specific manager he got to dual boot DOS and Linux, and Windows. What I remember about his demonstration and praise, was that it was almost like a secondary BIOS. He changed the BIOS to skip the floppy etc.. on boot, and load the manager so he could select the configuration he wanted. At "this" point it would go through it's own boot sequence which was practically identical to the one offered in BIOS (floppy then CD then HDD.) Like some of the managers I've been trying, it would only show the partitions "enabled" for that particular configuration. I distinctly remember him setting up his configurations on un-partitioned drives, then when he rebooted with the install disk inserted, he selected the correct configuration then booted to the install disk. When it installed, it only saw the partition he had designated as the boot drive for that configuration. I "think", but am not completely sure, he might have had to re-install the manager after one of the OSes he installed, but if so, it didn't pose that much of a problem for him. The thing is, I cannot remember which manager it was, and I cannot seem to find one that matches what I remember. They either won't partition the drive for you, are a real pain in the rear to set up, will not allow follow up boot sequencing, or just don't work at all. The closest I've found so far is BootIT Bare Metal (I even tried BootIT NG, thinking the older one might have worked differently.) But I could not get it to boot to CD after selecting a configuration. Any ideas which manager he had at that time?

Thank you.

Feeding Dragon

Reply 1 of 3, by j^aws

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I used System Commander back in the day. It installed into the Master Boot Record, and it had its own partitioning utility. At one point, I had W98, W2K, BeOS and Linux all multi-booting from its menus, and IIRC, an option from the menu to boot from drive A: as well... So, you could boot to a CD drive via the floppy, but my memory is hazy...

Reply 3 of 3, by Totempole

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I use Symantec BootMagic. Should work for what you want to do.

My Retro Gaming PC:
Pentium III 450MHz Katmai Slot 1
Transcend 256MB PC133
Gigabyte GA-6BXC
MSI Geforce 2 MX400 AGP
Ensoniq ES1371 PCI
Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA