Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (4212)	12/14/1998 4:44:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

I would assume he means a fat16 partition. If you want to use the multiboot capabilities of NT, you've got to go through some sort of boot sector shuffling such as we've been talking about in these numerous posts, or stop being a moron and hire a boot manager to do it for you <g>. This IS supposed to be a joke (not the boot manager part, though). I think one of the major values of this kind of procedure (and its discussion) is not so much what you end up with on the PC, though that's valuable too, but the understanding of the underlying structure of things. Here's the simplest I can break it down. When NT is installed, it saves the previous partition boot sector of the C partition (the partition boot sector is just the first physical sector of the partition). IF this boot sector is that of a previously installed OS, then you can boot that previous OS as "other" from NT. If not, and you want to use NT's "boot other" facility, you have to contrive to get the other OS installed (which destroys NT's boot sector), then get Other's boot sector into bootsect.dos, then get NT's boot sector back. There have been several ways of doing this discussed. That's it. There's no way to avoid this soft-shoe sector shuffle IF you want to use NT's "other OS" boot for DOS (or some other OS), since the other OS wasn't installed first. The BIOS selection of a boot drive is something else. That bypasses the problem by selecting from more than one possible physical drive, each of which can have an independently booting OS. In effect, the bios is a limited boot manager. You're not using the NT "boot other" capability. Boot managers bypass the problem by booting themselves then booting the OS you select. Similar to the bios, though with much more capability. As you know, I am not an expert on boot managers. I haven't answered your question quite directly but tried to lead you to the answer. Did I succeed? <g> Spots