> > If! You know what you are doing ;-)

> Why do you add this caveat?  Does this mean it won't hold the user's
> hand (like System Commander will)?

That is precisely what it means.

BootIT NG is an extremely functional partitioning and boot utility that works outside of any OS. It can be installed to its own EMBRL partition or run straight from a floppy. This keeps you from being dependent on any OS working. Also includes imaging (direct to hdd or atapi CDRW). But, it will not hold your hand, you need to know what you are doing.

Its other good selling point is very good newsgroup support from the author and a few others. Server: terabyteunlimited.com, login as "guest" with the password "guest".

Rick Rogers

Terabyte is three things: Boot manager, partitioner and versatile backup tool. It can all be run from a floppy, but it does a lot. It can also be installed to the HDD, best in a tiny partition of it's own, (which I have yet to do). It can shrink/expand a partition w/o data loss. Mine was shrunk, has gone to HD1 & back and is running well.

PCR

>Can you point me to a thoroughly detailed comparative review of these
>products?

As I'm sure you expected, you're getting lots of opinions about what various people *like*, but not a lot of meat about why or what the differences are. (One good point, though, was that paying for something doesn't make it better.)

Give some thought to how you're going to partition your hard drive to support your chosen os's (you indicate triple-booting but mention only two os's). Consider that a single hard drive can normally (see below *) only support four primary partitions, one of which may be an "extended" partition which can be subdivided into additional volumes (aka, partitions) — the partition scheme would look something like ([1] [2] [3] [4a,4b,4c,…]). Linux requires at least two partitions (one being its swap partition), so if you have a Windows system and like to keep your data on a separate partition (e.g., "D:"), you could use up all four partition table entries just between these two os's. However, not everything requires its own primary partition — while DOS and Win9x must be installed on primary partitions, XP and both linux partitions can live in volumes within an extended partition. An example with 5 os's might be ([DOS] [W95] [W98] [XP,linux,linux-swap,DOSext]).

Why is this material? Because ideally you want only certain partitions visible depending on which os you boot, and some boot managers provide more control over hiding/unhiding the various partitions. For example, Powerquest's BootMagic is a good, easy-to-use program (and free, if you've already got PartitionMagic), but it will only hide primary partitions, not individual volumes of the extended partition. In the above 5-os example, you could configure BM to boot W98 while hiding the DOS and W95 partitions, but BM would not be able to hide the XP partition and leave the DOSext (for example, a "D:" drive for W98) visible because they're both within the extended partition. W98 won't be able to read the linux partitions anyway, nor the XP partition if it's formatted as ntfs, but that's another issue, my point is the boot manager is not controlling whether or not those partitions are visible. This would be a problem if the XP partition was fat32.

My experience with System Commander was with an old version, but I remember that program also could not selectively control the volumes in the extended partition.

TeraByte's BootitNG does allow fine-tuning the visibility of all partitions, including individual volumes within the extended partition. I believe (though I haven't confirmed this) that it can also permit XP to completely reside within an extended partition. (Normally if you install XP into an extended partition, it still needs to boot from a primary partition that can't be hidden). In reference to (*) above, BootitNG can also allow you to install more than 4 primary partitions, giving you the ability to install huge numbers of os's, but it does so by converting your hard disk's partition table to a proprietary format, which personally would make me uncomfortable. Fortunately, you don't have to enable that feature.

Another possibility you might look at is XOSL (www.xosl.org), which I haven't tried but appears to be full featured and free, as well. I'm not really familiar with linux boot managers, but I'm not sure grub or lilo can provide this kind of control over the boot options for the DOS or Win os's. I'm also not familiar with the other boot managers you've mentioned.

I hope my notes here will spur others to post constructive details or correct errors in my notes.

Also, beware that some (many?) os's must boot from a partition physically within the first 1024 cylinders of the hard disk, regardless of how you manage their visibility. ("Physically" is used loosely here, as modern disks translate the real geometry, but typically this means the first 8GB).

And lastly, my personal preferences: BootitNG for complex setups, or Powerquest's BootMagic if you don't need BootitNG's enhancements.

I'm Dan