Tri Booting

[Maniac]

Is there a way to boot Dos, Win95 and NT 4.0.

Could you use the boot loader in some way?

[stevet]

Of course you could use all kinds of system commander-type programs to do what you are trying to do, but you don't need to spend the money. The directions below are given assuming that you are starting with a blank hard drive.

First of all, NT and DOS will require that your primary partition on the c-drive is FAT (not FAT32 or NTFS). Install DOS, then install Win95. You should now have a crude dual-boot setup between DOS and Win95. When your computer is starting, you can press F8 when you see the message "Starting Windows 95...". Then, from the Windows 95 startup menu choose "Previous version of MS-DOS" to boot into DOS 6.22 (or whatever version of DOS you installed). Then go ahead and install NT4. When NT setup finds that you already have Windows 95 installed it will automatically add the OS to the NT boot menu as "Microsoft Windows".

So, to boot to DOS, choose "Microsoft Windows" from the NT boot menu, then press F8 and choose "Previous Version of MS-DOS" from the Windows 95 startup menu. To boot to Win95, choose "Microsoft Windows" from the NT boot menu. And of course start NT4 just like normal.

I hope this helps. And, like I said, you could always pay $40 for a program that would manage these three OSes and more and would even make it easier to choose which one you want to boot to when you start your computer.

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Steve Taylor - Service Manager
Altoplanos Information Systems, Inc.

[Paul Cunningham]

You should be able to get a copy of PCanswers magazine in Australia ( I know they're on sale there ) On a fair amount of there cover CDs they put PQ Bootmagic on, Which will do exactly what you want.

[Maniac]

Thank guys.