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Smart Boot Manager

Table of Contents

cmd:SBM

Basic Info

Info

Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is an OS independent and full-featured boot manager with an easy-to-use user interface.

Source

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

Related Urls

Smart Boot Manager Screen Shots
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/scrshots.html

Smart Boot Manager linuxquestions wiki
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Smart_Boot_Manager

http://www.linuxsoft.cz/en/sw_detail.php?id_item=740

Description

The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OSes from several kinds of media, while keeping its size no more than 30K bytes. In another words, SBM does NOT touch any of your partitions, it totally fits into the first track (the hidden track) of your hard disk!

SBM supports booting from floppy, hard disk and CD-ROM.

Features

Automatically searches drivers and partitions: Smart BootManager can automatically search and locate all the floppy, hard and CD-ROM drives as well as partitions. It can distinguish whether a partition is bootable or non-bootable, and only incorporates bootable partitions into the Boot Menu.
Powerful Boot Schedule: You can assign a time schedule for each Boot Record (a partition or a driver). Smart BootManager will boot them automatically at the time specified. For example, you can schedule your computer to boot Windows 98 at the time when you start work during the week and boot Linux at midnight or during the weekend.
Booting from CD-ROM: Smart BootManager supports booting from almost all kinds of IDE ATAPI CD-ROMs, including PCMCIA CD-ROMs. You can let the BIOS boot from C: only and assign a password for it, then you can boot from CD-ROM with Smart BootManager. If you have a laptop with a special PCMCIA CD-ROM which has no support for booting in the BIOS, Smart BootManager can help you boot from it.
Swapping driver ID: Smart BootManager can boot most operating systems from not only the first hard disk but also others. If you have more than one hard disk in a computer and run different operating systems on each, this feature is very useful.
Auto Delay Boot: Smart BootManager can boot the default boot record automatically if no keys are pressed within a specfied delay time. By combining this feature and the Boot Schedule feature, you can let your computer boot different operating systems automatically according to the schedule table.
Sending keystrokes to the operating system: Smart BootManager can preload some keystrokes into the key buffer before booting an operating system to control its booting process. For example, you can send Shift-F5 to Windows 98 to let it go into the real DOS mode.
Easy Customized Theme file: The theme file includes all screen elements, such as window colors, messages, background, font etc. It does not contain any program code, so you can change Smart BootManager's Look and Feel without recompiling it. Just choose your favorite theme and install it. Smart BootManager now has six themes with different languages, including English, Chinese, Czech, German, Hungarian and Russian. More themes with other languages will be out soon. If there is no theme for your native language, you can create one yourself. Read the documentation for details.
Password protection: You can assign a password for each partition or drive, and also set a password for administrator. There are three security levels in SBM.

Releases

Comments

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Smart_Boot_Manager

Smart Boot Manager works by chainloading an operating system. This means it will not boot the OS directly, but requires a bootloader for the OS on the specified partition. This is also how SBM is able to find bootable partitions, by looking for boot record (bootloaders) using it's find feature.

http://help.lockergnome.com/linux/bootable-floppy-Debian-USB-ftopict419275.html

older hardware which refuse to boot from CDs can use a Smart Boot Manager (SBM) boot floppy to "jumpstart" booting from a CD. Unfortunately, USB is a different story. SBM is unmaintained and has no support for USB, IIRC.

documented on: Mar 26, 2007, Douglas Mayne

Smart Boot Manager

http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

This nifty boot floppy makes it easy to boot your computer from various devices, and is especially good for booting from a CD in machines with older (or flaky) BIOS. To make one of these floppy disks for yourself, download this sbm.img disk image file (or one from the official btmgr site) and write it onto a blank floppy. http://linux.simple.be/tools/floppy/sbm.img http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

For Linux and UNIX, you can use dd:

# dd if=image of=/dev/fd0          (where image is the image filename)
# cmp image /dev/fd0               (where image is the image filename)

Floppy disks are one of the least reliable media around, so be prepared for multiple bad disks. It's a good idea to compare (with cmp) the written floppy disk with the image file. If cmp finds a difference, throw that floppy away and try another one. Label your floppies.

documented on: 2007.06.20