Dual-Booting

Dual booting a system.... Hmmm.... What's that, you might ask.
Well. Dual-Booting is a fancy smancy word for having two ore more operatingsystem's on the same computer, were each operatingsystem can be loaded from a menu, whenever the machine is started or being rebooted.

It is, however, not a way of starting up multiple operating system's at the same time.
That is called virtualization, and is a totally different beast.
Another confusion regarding Multi-Boot, is that people have been using the build-in features of Windows-9X system's to prevent the graphical part from being loaded. That is however not a true multiboot. Because it is the exact same operatingsystem that one are dealing with.
It is NOT two different installations. And it can best of all be compared to multitasking in Windows-9X and Os/2. Or even Win-NT compared to Win-9X.

If such operating system as Windows-95 is being put to the test, it is soon realised that this is indeed not multitasking. It is however, something that are named Taskmanager. On the other hand, Windows-NT has true preemptive multitasking. Even Os/2 has that.

Multi-Boot comes in different variaties, and there are loads of program's that can deal with this, and one can use for setting up such desires.
One of the oldest known such piece of software, are the one that came with IBM's Os/2-Warp (possible Os/2 Version 2.1), and it just worked. I came to know this software back in 1995, and it simply made my life easier. At that point in time.
I could spare the primaery installment of MS-Dos-6.22 that I used daily at that time, and I could have Os/2 installed for testing. Just to see if I should give up MS-Dos all together.

Later, I used GRUB and LILO boot loaders (another fancy word for Multi-Booting) whenever I had Linux installed on my machine. I only gave up MS-Dos as late as 2003. Yeah... That was late, I know. I just had a deep need for that OS untill 2003.

The real idea behind a multiboot setup, or an boot manager if you like. Are that the boot-partition are an menu. In some rare cases it is hidden in the MBR of the harddrive. Just not in most cases.... And whenever one of the entries on the menu is choosen, it will first set that partition as active (the bit is set high) and it will start the bootprocess from that partition. This is an advantage that can be utilized when an operating system such as MS-Dos are to be installed. Just set the partition active, using the bootmanager, and reboot the PC with the MS-Dos installer in the floppy drive. Then you press "F5" to avoid setup/boot files and you are let straight into the prompt. Then you start by typing "Format c: /u /s" and it will format and install the basic OS system files. Reboot again and do nothing untill the MS-Dos installer menu asks for user-input.

To multiboot, you need a standalone Boot Manager. Not the one that are supplied by Microsoft, as a build in thingy in Windows-9X. You need a real program.
That can be a program as the one originally supplied alongside Os/2-Warp 3 or 4. The downside is that it can only support up to 8 gigabyte drives. And it costs money. On the other hand, if you have a retro computer with a 4 gigabyte drive, and a copy of Os/2. Then you are really in luck. If you have a larger machine, then download "Ultimate Boot Disc" that contains Extended-Fdisk. If the machine you have, are an old Pentium-166mhz then hunt for version 3.3. You only need at least 60 megabyte RAM in order for it to run propperly.

To set multiboot up, you need to follow this simple guideline... (based on an empty HDD)

1: Boot up ultimate bootdisk and enter "Extended Fdisk".
2: Enter the dropdown menu, and install the bootloader.
3: Create a desired PRIMAERY partition, or more, depending on what you need to install.
4: Highlight each newly created partition, and "add" them as a menu entry.
5: Save and exit/reboot the pc.
6: Try to load an empty partition before each OS installation, the "active flag" will be set.

Hope you had at least some use of this blog entry. I can't support you on this, so you need to find the right tools/software and try this out. It is simple and really easy to do.