tbrox said in news:
[email protected]:
If you configured bootmagic properly you should be prompted at
startup to choose which OS you want to boot to. This will automaticly
make one partition active and hide the other.
That only works if the operatings systems are in *primary* partition AND on
the same physical [first] hard disk. If one OS is in a logical drive (in an
extended partition) or one of them is on a different physical disk, it may
be possible that booting one OS results in you being able to see the other
OS. In this case, if you boot the Windows NT/2K/XP partition, you can see
FAT partitions on the Windows 9x/ME partitions (but NT4 can't read FAT32
since it was released after NT4's release), but if you boot Windows 9x/ME
then you can only see the Windows NT4/2K/XP partitions *if* they did NOT use
NTFS (or if you install an NTFS read-only file driver under Windows 9x/ME).
I haven't used Bootmagic for maybe a couple years. I remember having
Windows 98 boot from the C: drive (as only 1 primary partition on 1st
physical drive) and having Windows NT4 (and later Windows 2000) boot from
the D: drive (as only 1 primary partition on 2nd physical drive). I did not
like the possibility of corrupting the OS & application setup by having the
OS partitions visible to each other. As I recall, there is an advanced
option in BootMagic's configuration that lets you decide to hide partitions.
There is a partition attribute, or system ID, and their values have specific
meanings; see
http://snipurl.com/6al7 or
http://snipurl.com/6al2.
However, I think Windows XP (and maybe 2000) violate the partition
attributes and can still see a partition that has been marked as hidden.
However, you should be able to simply remove the drive letter assignment in
Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) so that partition isn't usable; i.e., it is
hidden to applications, like Explorer, because it has no drive letter but is
still visible to disk utilities, like Disk Management and PartitionMagic.
"However, in reality, operating systems do not really care about the
partition type byte; e.g., Linux doesn't care at all what it is"
(
http://snipurl.com/6al6).
See:
http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/primus/id3403.html
So what you might end up doing under Windows NT4/2K/XP is just to NOT assign
a drive letter to the recognizable partition containing Windows 9x/ME. If
you format your Windows NT4/2K/XP partition using NTFS then Windows 9x/ME
won't be able to recognize that partition when you boot using that OS.
