whats a good 3rd party mutilboot software

[Jason]

Anyone know of a 3rd party utility that will alow me to mutil boot a few
different versons of windows? For instance if I want to put five seperate
windows OS's onto one PC.

 

[Guest]

Symantec Ghost. (not free)
Symantec.com

Here's a freebie with a WindowsXP platform, but I've not used it.
PC World Downloads - Ranish Partition Manager
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,6170-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html

 

[thecreator]

Hi Jason,

As long as the operating systems are in their own partition, here is a good one.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

BootItT NG Features:

a.. Compatible with all Windows versions (9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2003/Vista).
b.. Compatible with x64 (AMD64/EM64T) and Windows 64bit OS (non-GPT).
c.. IEEE1394/USB 2.0 high-speed support for imaging/partitioning
d.. Support for large hard drives (2 TB) and partitions (1-2 TB)
e.. Non-destructive resizing and conversion for FAT/FAT32
f.. Non-destructive resizing for NTFS
g.. Creation and (secure) deletion of partitions/volumes
h.. Undelete partitions/volumes
i.. FAT/FAT32 formatting
j.. Copying and moving of partitions/volumes
k.. Support for Linux Ext2/Ext3 and ReiserFS file systems
l.. Imaging (including directly to CD-R/RW or DVD+R+RW-R-RW)
m.. Booting any partition on any hard drive (via BIOS)
n.. Booting from the CD/DVD drive
o.. Booting multiple operating systems from a single partition
p.. Create over 200 primary partitions (if desired)
q.. User ID and password protection
r.. Free upgrades (1.00-1.99) (registration-key versions only)
s.. And lots more...

 

[John John]

BootIt NG (not free, but fully functional trial):
http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html

XOSL (free):
http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm

John

 

[Leroy]

I use Partition Magic.

 

[John]

Anyone know of a 3rd party utility that will alow me to mutil boot a few
different versons of windows? For instance if I want to put five seperate
windows OS's onto one PC.

One PC, Six Hard Drives, 37 OSes!
3) World-Class Multibooting, Part 1
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-03-31.htm#3
4) World-Class Multibooting, Part 2
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-03-31.htm#4
All the OSes are loaded onto six hard drives, and divvied across five
separate boot menus with the help of a freely distributed bootloader
called XOSL.
Extended Operating System Loader (XOSL)
http://www.pricelessware.org/thelist/sys.htm
http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm
http://jimbomania.com/desktop.html

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Anyone know of a 3rd party utility that will alow me to mutil boot a few
different versons of windows? For instance if I want to put five seperate
windows OS's onto one PC.

In addition to the several suggestions already presented, you might
what to look into simply creating multiple "Virtual Machines" using
either VirtualPC or VMWare.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. -Bertrand Russell

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Anyone know of a 3rd party utility that will alow me to mutil boot a few
different versons of windows? For instance if I want to put five seperate
windows OS's onto one PC.

Ntldr, the boot manager for WinNT/2K/XP can multiboot various
Windows OS's with virtually no restriction on the number. The
boot.ini file's entries for designating Win98 or Win95 or earlier
can be a little arcane, though. What OSes do you want to boot?

*TimDaniels*

 

[ChrisRM]

Nobody has mentioned Boot Magic which comes with Partition Magic.

I use both and they are pretty good IMHO

Unfortunately its not free.

Warning: unless you are feeling very luck or are a bonafide genius do not
use XP's multi boot abilities, you will regret it I DID.

Probably the best answer given by others was to look at the Virtual Machine
option MS gives Virtual PC away free and VMWare give away various bits of
there's as well. You will need a reasonable amount of memory 512 minimum (I
have used Virtual PC with 512 memory on a 1.4Mhz processor and it work just
fine, more of both would be an advantage though) If this floats your boat
try listening to some of the Security Now Web casts from Steve Gibson you
can find them here

http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm

Definitely Look at
No 57 Virtual PC versus VMWare
No 53 VMWare
No 50 Virtual Machine History & Technology

They all run about an hour and are very interesting. All the other webcasts
in the list are worth a listen too.

Good Luck

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Warning: unless you are feeling very luck or are a bonafide
genius do not use XP's multi boot abilities, you will regret it I DID.

There's nothing tricky about using MS's ntldr for multi-booting.
If there is a difficulty, though, it's in the syntax of the boot.ini file,
the file of entries which tell the location of each OS that can be
loaded. And that syntax includes the parameter "rdisk()".

"rdisk()" represents the location of the hard drive where the
OS to be loaded resides. The value of "x" in "rdisk(x)"
stands for the position (starting with "0") of that hard drive
in the boot order of the BIOS. In 99% of the cases, that is
the hard drive that is Master on IDE channel 0 (what some
call the "primary channel"). Of course, that HD boot order
can be changed manually in most BIOSes, but whatever the
HD boot order is changed to, "rdisk(0)" still refers to whatever
HD is at the head of that boot order. (Please notice that I've
referred consistently to the "HD boot order", not just the
"boot order", the latter indicating the boot order of classes
of ATA/ATAPI devices, not just hard drives.) Then, in turn,
"rdisk(1)" refers to the next HD in the HD boot order - the
Slave on IDE channel 0 in the default case. "rdisk(2)" refers
to the next HD in the HD boot order - the Master on IDE
channel 1. Then "rdisk(3)" refers usually to the Slave on IDE
channel 1. If there is no HD at any of those positions, the
HD at the next position in the sequence is assumed.

That's IT! That's the hard part of understanding boot.ini .
All the rest can be found on numerous websites.

The rest of understanding MS multi-booting is knowing
that the MBR of the HD at the head of the HD boot order
gets control during bootup. That MBR looks for the
Primary partition that has been marked "active" on that
HD. The MBR then passes control to the boot sector on
that partition, and the boot sector looks for ntldr and passes
control to ntlder. Then ntldr looks for boot.ini, and boot.ini
can point to any folder on any partition on any hard drive
in the system as the location of an OS to load.

The beauty of using MS's boot manager is that you don't
have to buy or install more software, and you don't have
to dedicate a partition to it. It's right there, and you use it
every time you start up WinNT/2K/XP.

*TimDaniels*

 

[ChrisRM]

OR

Alternativeley you could spend GBP 19.99 / USD 39.99 and in the time it
took to read and UNDERSTAND all that ( which is not all you will need to
now) you can install a product like Partition Magic have a nice GUI
interface, a nice GUI help facility, and have the disk partitioned and get
it right first time rather than eventually.


I still say your best bet is to use Virtual PC or VMWare then you can have
as many images as you can fit on the disk.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Alternativeley you could spend GBP 19.99 / USD 39.99 and in the time it
took to read and UNDERSTAND all that ( which is not all you will need to
now) you can install a product like Partition Magic have a nice GUI
interface, a nice GUI help facility, and have the disk partitioned and get
it right first time rather than eventually.


I still say your best bet is to use Virtual PC or VMWare then you can have
as many images as you can fit on the disk.

If you couldn't understand that, then indeed go with a 3rd-party utility.
I can multi-boot more than 12 OSes using ntldr with no problem,
and if one has the disk space, many more than that are possible.

As for "Virtual"-anything, it slows down the computer. How much is
tolerable is up to the user and the underlying speed of the system.

*TimDaniels*