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Tools for switching between active partitions?

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First post, by Glaurung

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For multi booting, rather than mucking around with bootsect.dos and boot.ini and so on, I thought I'd just create multiple primary partitions and switch the active partition from one to the other. I have the partitions created and OS's installed, and there's no problem with switching between them using Fdisk/diskpart. But I vaguely remember having a program that let me do this without having to manually set the active partition each time at the command line, 20+ years ago (it might have come with partition magic? I can't recall).

Unfortunately, Google is being useless for finding such a utility today. Is there such a tool, that will work for both 9x and XP/later versions, and that I won't have to pay for?

Reply 1 of 2, by Disruptor

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For multi boot WinXP / 9x you simply can use Windows XP' boot manager.
Just dump your 9x' boot sector into a 512 byte sized file and copy it to your XP start partition.
In BOOT.INI add
C:\BOOTSECT.W98 = "Windows 98"

Reply 2 of 2, by Glaurung

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Disruptor wrote on 2024-11-25, 18:11:
For multi boot WinXP / 9x you simply can use Windows XP' boot manager. Just dump your 9x' boot sector into a 512 byte sized file […]
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For multi boot WinXP / 9x you simply can use Windows XP' boot manager.
Just dump your 9x' boot sector into a 512 byte sized file and copy it to your XP start partition.
In BOOT.INI add
C:\BOOTSECT.W98 = "Windows 98"

I tried using boot.ini and the bootsect.dos thing, it did not work with each windows version on a primary partition, probably because each primary partition is invisible to the others, and only the active partition can be accessed by the OS.

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