jcarvalho wrote:

Hi again my friends! All is working fine now!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee The problem was: In BIOS Boot sequence definition it was CDROM […]
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Hi again my friends! All is working fine now!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
The problem was: In BIOS Boot sequence definition it was CDROM, A, C so, when booting in order to start OS instalation, the boot order in MBR assigned in Ranish or other partition manager takes priority. I have changed the startup sequence to A,C, SCSI to give PLOP a chance 😊 Now I can boot to empty partition, boot fails, returns to plop, I select boot from CDROM but the startup partition is already assigned. So no troble at all to boot MSDOS, W98 or ME... I can make dos partition visible in both OS to transfer files withe zero problems and no OS crash's!!!!
Problem solved!!!! Many thanks for all the help that everyone provided!!!! Everything is working!!! Tomorrow will swap for a larger disk...

BTW there is a patch in ranish partition to increase FAT16 partition to 8GB, (MSDOS partition) if I apply that patch will it work in 6.22 using plop as boot manager??
THANKS TO ALL!!!

I am glad you got it working, I would have never looked at boot priority , so you thought me something new today 😀

FaSMaN wrote:

jcarvalho wrote:

Hi again my friends! All is working fine now!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee The problem was: In BIOS Boot sequence definition it was CDROM […]
Show full quote

Hi again my friends! All is working fine now!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
The problem was: In BIOS Boot sequence definition it was CDROM, A, C so, when booting in order to start OS instalation, the boot order in MBR assigned in Ranish or other partition manager takes priority. I have changed the startup sequence to A,C, SCSI to give PLOP a chance 😊 Now I can boot to empty partition, boot fails, returns to plop, I select boot from CDROM but the startup partition is already assigned. So no troble at all to boot MSDOS, W98 or ME... I can make dos partition visible in both OS to transfer files withe zero problems and no OS crash's!!!!
Problem solved!!!! Many thanks for all the help that everyone provided!!!! Everything is working!!! Tomorrow will swap for a larger disk...

BTW there is a patch in ranish partition to increase FAT16 partition to 8GB, (MSDOS partition) if I apply that patch will it work in 6.22 using plop as boot manager??
THANKS TO ALL!!!

I am glad you got it working, I would have never looked at boot priority , so you thought me something new today 😀

It is I that need to show gratitude for your kind help and to take the time to do some awesome videos sharing your knowledge/experience with others... You were my inspiration my friend... Now it is time to repeat my setup in a bigger disk... I used an 40GB HD... Time to go test an 80GB HD... I have learned a lot with all the kind help that you and other users gave me...
This is the ultimate place to share experiences... I am very very grateful to all the members...

Is the process similar when using multiple hard-drives?

Let's say 3 drives, one for DOS, one for Windows 98, one for XP?

Almost exactly.

But XP messes things up a bit. Any NT based Windows OS I tried (NT, 2000, XP), insists (definitely) on using the first physical HDD (disk 0) and its first partition for its boot strap. Apart from that, it's all the same.

I've experimented with PLOP a bit lately, the goal for me is to dual-boot DOS, Win98 and XP.

DOS and Win98 was no problem, but when I got to XP it naturally overwrote the MBR. I could not get back to XP properly again if I "rewrote" PLOP from a boot disk. It says "The bootloader is the MBR" in red text. Maybe someone knows how to do it?

Strange. Plop should load into the MBR and jump execution to the boot sector of the NTFS partition.

I got a bit further by reinstalling XP and PLOP, but now XP complains about missing hal.dll.

This seems to be a bug in PLOP, the fix is in the FAQ: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/faq.html#faq12

Anyone having dual boot issues with Plop in VMware? I've tried every possible DOS+WinME configuration, and I couldn't have a stable configuration even once. While in PCem I managed from 2nd or 3rd attempt (although it was slow as hell).

Sadly I've never tried it with VM

FaSMaN wrote on 2020-04-27, 13:48:

Sadly I've never tried it with VM

Is there any other human-friendly boot manager, known to handle well DOS+ME ?

So, are you using two separate hard drive images in this VM, or two partitions on the same hard drive image?

If you are using two partitions then in theory you don't even need a boot manager, and can just toggle the active partition flag manually.

Jorpho wrote on 2020-04-27, 15:57:

So, are you using two separate hard drive images in this VM, or two partitions on the same hard drive image?

If you are using two partitions then in theory you don't even need a boot manager, and can just toggle the active partition flag manually.

That's an interesting approach (about toggling the flag manually), but somewhat no very intuitive ))

vasya segment wrote on 2020-04-27, 13:55:

FaSMaN wrote on 2020-04-27, 13:48:

Sadly I've never tried it with VM

Is there any other human-friendly boot manager, known to handle well DOS+ME ?

V-Com's System Commander 7 or 2000 is very user friendly, but what I like better and use most is Masterbooter 3.7

aha2940 wrote on 2020-04-28, 00:34:

vasya segment wrote on 2020-04-27, 13:55:

FaSMaN wrote on 2020-04-27, 13:48:

Sadly I've never tried it with VM

Is there any other human-friendly boot manager, known to handle well DOS+ME ?

V-Com's System Commander 7 or 2000 is very user friendly, but what I like better and use most is Masterbooter 3.7

Thanks, I've already settled for XOSL, which worked straight from the very 1st attempt. It's free and open-source, btw.
Thank you all, guys!

I'll also recommend VCOM's old Partition Commander / System Commander. It works great for Win9x and DOS systems.

If you have access to the OS/2 Warp 4 boot disks, the included boot manager also works very well.

My favorite by far though is PLOP. The ability to isolate partitions and drives from each other is what makes it so great.

KT7AGuy wrote on 2020-04-28, 18:41:

I'll also recommend VCOM's old Partition Commander / System Commander. It works great for Win9x and DOS systems.

If you have access to the OS/2 Warp 4 boot disks, the included boot manager also works very well.

My favorite by far though is PLOP. The ability to isolate partitions and drives from each other is what makes it so great.

Funny, that's exactly the reason why I like Masterbooter so much. That and the fact that it's so simple to configure and so tiny (like 50kB total). I had no idea PLOP existen until I read this thread.

KT7AGuy wrote on 2020-04-28, 18:41:

I'll also recommend VCOM's old Partition Commander / System Commander. It works great for Win9x and DOS systems.

If you have access to the OS/2 Warp 4 boot disks, the included boot manager also works very well.

My favorite by far though is PLOP. The ability to isolate partitions and drives from each other is what makes it so great.

Afaik, it's not unique feature - XOSL can do that too. Here, read the documentation online -

5.3.3 Partition hiding When the Hiding button is pressed, a new dialog is shown where you can select which partitions to hide fo […]
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5.3.3 Partition hiding
When the Hiding button is pressed, a new dialog is shown where you can select which partitions to hide for the selected boot item. The name of the boot item is displayed in the title of the dialog, and is displayed bold in the Copy from list.

XOSL only provides limited support for hiding, and only partitions with the following file systems can be hidden:

01 - FAT12
04 - FAT16 <= 32Mb
06 - FAT16 > 32Mb
07 - NTFS / HPFS
0b - FAT32
0c - FAT32 LBA
0e - FAT16 LBA
0f - Extended LBA

http://xosl-ow.sourceforge.net/manual/user/5.html#5_3_3

I have installed Plop on DX4-100 machine. After setting boot to "C" drive actualy it does not shows the Plop menu. It shows few seconds later some foreign characters. I have configured Plop to textmode, but nothing changed. With ctrl+PageUp(down) also does not change anything. It looks like the whole system is freezing, do not react on ctr+alt+del.

zsolex wrote on 2021-11-06, 19:40:

I have installed Plop on DX4-100 machine. After setting boot to "C" drive actualy it does not shows the Plop menu. It shows few seconds later some foreign characters. I have configured Plop to textmode, but nothing changed. With ctrl+PageUp(down) also does not change anything. It looks like the whole system is freezing, do not react on ctr+alt+del.

I have been trying to set up a dual boot system today and have had a similar problem. After installing and rebooting, the computer will go as far as "Verifying DMI pool data" and then it will go no further. It does not display any characters and it does remain responsive to ctrl-alt-del so I can reboot, but it won't go any further than that. I also tried to uninstall and while it said it was successful, the system would stick in the same position after reboot and I had to rebuild the MBR using another tool to get it to boot again.

One caveat is that I think I tried a full install a second time after the problem arose on my first attempt, so it's possible that the uninstall did not work because the installer overwrote the original MBR backup with a backup of the already inoperative plop installation.

Either way, I can't get it to boot with plop. I have found many reports that plop will not work with a DDO, but as far as I know I am not using one.