dr.zeissler wrote:

xfdisk = small, fast reliable. Haven't found a better tool yet.

Hmmm, need to check that one. The one I use is something called "efdisk", part of the masterbooter package.

Jorpho wrote:

tayyare wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

...In fact, there's really no need for a boot manager at all – whenever you want to boot the other operating system, all you have to do is switch the active flag and reboot.

Yeah, it's always possible to scratch your left ear with your right hand. 🤣 But it is not that practical.

Oh, it can be quite practical – especially after the novelty inevitably wears off and you end up booting the same OS most of the time anyway. I'm not sure what other programs can do it, but gdisk (included with Norton Ghost) can set the active flag with a single command. The greatest advantage is that this way, you don't have to worry about corrupting your bootloader, but I suppose you can also avoid that if you can use config.sys as Mr. RJDog illustrates.

The utility I use (MasterBooter) has options adjustable for "default OS to boot" and "boot menu display time" which I generally adjust to 5 sec. I still think that it is more practical. If you have something another to do with MBR and don't want anything in there, of course what you suggest makes more sense.

I remember back in 1997/98, I used the boot manager of OS/2 Warp 3 to dual boot between DOS 6.22 and Windows 95.
After a while, I came to realise there was no need (at least for me) to have both DOS 6.22 and DOS 7.0./7.1 on the same system.
You can very easily configure any Windows 9x installation to either boot straight into DOS or Windows (with multiple start up configurations).
Refer this thread for more info - How to create a boot (start up) menu under Windows 9x/ME

GAG is an excellent graphical boot manager. I use it for my dual boot Win2k/DOS system. http://gag.sourceforge.net/