Hi tomos,

do you miss Ireland? How do you cope with all those humor-free Germans (me included)? I am not spying on you but I have found your post whilst reading the thread "OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?". I might introduce myself properly over there as well, but not today.

Thank you for your links. I will read them after posting this.
Yes, XP is on a logical drive on my desktop computer (bought that when I was working in the UK). So is Win2000 on a virtual machine. I have two old laptops with Win98SE on a logical drive. I have never had any problems with that. Works like a charm. This is my boot.ini:


The three entries for XP are actually all the same installation. I have added them for convenience. When I make two or three primary partitions visible the number needs to change. Right now minint.bin is just a non functional dummy, but floppy.bin will read the floppy boot sector and boot from A: drive, although my BIOS setup will check for HDD only. So even with a boot floppy inserted, the computer boots from the hard disk.

Ranish Partition Manager is good for studying and I regard it as an essential in my TOOLS collection. I also have a floppy without DOS that runs RPM. It starts very fast!!! But it sure has a learning curve. And a lot of features that are missing can be found in Powerquest Partition Magic, such as a graphical user interface with mouse support. On the other hand, RPM allows me to do things that PPM can not do. So I would have to use Powerquest's Partition Table Editor, to do the REAL multi booting thing. At the end of the day two tools are needed and I am used to RPM. Another thing is that PPM + PTedit together don't fit on a bootable DOS floppy, which has io.sys and command.com. Maybe I should try and compress some of those files. But because I have USB boot support on my desktop, I don't really need to do that. And PTedit will not boot from a floppy in under 5 seconds. Unfortunately there is no single application that does it all for me, and I use all three of them. PTedit even works under WinXP when I want to manually mess up the running system. :-*


Greetings
Wolf

I have been experimenting with partitioning my hard drive to be able to achieve these goals:

• multiple OS to choose from
• several instances of same OS to choose from
• have a drive with essential tools and data mapped to the same letter at all times
• write my own boot manager using batch files
• use hard disk backups for OS

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After researching and reading what I could find I came to the following conclusions:

• I have to partition my hard drive and give each OS its own space. The is a very limited amount (4) of primary partitions that I can put inside the partition table of the master boot record. But I can put any number of logical drives inside an extended partition, given an large enough hard disk.
• Most (maybe all) OS for PC run well when they are installed on a logical drive and I boot from a matching DOS floppy. So I thought maybe they also run well when booting from a small primary DOS partition.
• In order to have access to a collection of essential tools (they are in a folder called TOOLS), I would have to copy that folder onto all of the floppies and primary partitions. That clearly is not possible because of lack of space and it would be a pain to maintain in case I update one of the tools or batches. So I have created an extended partition that contains a FAT16 logical drive and always shows up as D:.

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Now I have a setup where

• C: is the only one of my primary partitions that gets mentioned in the MBR
• D: is the first (and always visible) logical drive and contains stuff that I consider essential. For me that is private data, DOS tools, and non-DOS tools that don't rely on being installed.
• E: is a logical drive where Windows operating systems (version >= 95) are installed. Only one of them is visible.
• F: contains a Setup folder where I keep installers for software.
• G: contains a Games folder and a Disks folder containing ISO images.
• H: contains a Backup folder for OS.
• This list is not complete but shows the organising of my hard disk.

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I have used these tools to set up my system:

• Microsoft DOS                    (operating system)
• Ranish Partition Manager         (partitioning tool)
• Powerquest Partition Magic       (partitioning tool)
• Norton Ghost                     (imaging tool)
• JP soft 4DOS                     (powerful batch language)
• BREXX by Vassilis N. Vlachoudis  (rexx extension to 4DOS batch language)
• Microsoft Debug                  (assembler extension to 4DOS batch language)
• Norton Commander                 (orthodox file manager for DOS)
• Volkov Commander                 (orthodox file manager for DOS)
• WBAT by Horst Schaeffer          (dialogue boxes, menus and more for DOS)

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Here is a pseudo screenshot:

The entire hard disk is represented in the 2nd row. Most space is occupied by the extended partition containing logical drives.

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My reason for starting this thread is not to get anybody to do something similar. I just want to present my thoughts and experiments with multibooting and partitioning. This thread is a spin off of this thread: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10154.msg78404#msg78404, which I did not want to hijack. I feel I could write an awful lot more here, but the reading would become pretty boring, unless I write about specific topics that others are interested in. So I invite you all to share your experiments as well, and to ask about specific topics if you like. I don't claim expertise on anything, but I might be able to help. My main inspiration came from this website in 1999: The REAL Multi-boot -Trombettworks. It has been updated since I got my inspiration. Very useful tutorial, very technical in places, and very much in love with Ranish Partition Manager.

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Greetings
Wolf