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To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (4173)	12/14/1998 12:57:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) of 14778

Booting DOS....Power Quest Boot Manager..After NT installation I spent a little time in the Partition Magic manual today. I was reading up on the boot manager. I am not proposing this as the best alternative..just looking at the options. The description of installing the boot manager assumes you have an existing OS on the full C drive. This would be the situation with a clean new NT installation. Without going into a step by step (which I don't think I can do) I can give a summary as to the way I understand it. The first step is to execute Partition Magic.( I am reading the 3.0 manual, 4.0 installs directly to NT where as 3.0 does not) With the resize option one reduces the size of the C partition. This leaves 'free space' at the end of the C partition. The second step is to install the boot manager from the Partition Magic menu. You tell Partition Magic to put the boot manager at the END of the free space in its own partition. This was a surprise to me. I always assumed it would be at the beginning of the drive as Spots explained with the NT boot manager. You then create a third partition for your DOS installation (or other OS). There is a bit of a catch 22 in the procedure as you must maintain a working boot. A detail that I need to reread to understand. It involves booting a couple of times and changing the active partition. The end result is changing the active partition to the last partition containing the boot manager. Since the partition that contains the original NT installation is set to "non active"? it is skipped in the boot search. Since the boot manager is on the only active partition the boot manager is seen first and then gives you the option of which partition/OS to boot. It would be wise to backup the NT installation before playing around with the PM BM. This may also have a catch 22 element if all you have is one physical drive and one partition. Drive Image requires a second partition or second drive to create the backup file. IMO this line of thought leads to a second physical drive as has been mentioned in a couple of the recent posts addressing this issue. IMO your are best off with a harddrive DOS installation which is best done on a second physical drive leaving the original NT installation untouched. My preference would be to select the boot from the bios. It seems a lot safer than the boot manager or 'inserting' records at the beginning of the NT installation. Safe is a dangerous word here as one can do damage in the bios too..just a different kind of damage. Both the BM option and the 'insert' option sound 'scary' to me. By that I mean one misstep and you lose NT. Once installed either should work fine. IMO you should also maintain the capability of booting DOS from a floppy even if you have a harddrive DOS installation. The floppy DOS boot could suffice by itself...it is certainly the cheapest solution. Let us know if all your computer friends are Mac users ie you do not have a way to make a DOS boot disk. Zeuspaul

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