I've been installing multiple OS's since about 1994, when I first installed OS/2 on a machine with DOS/Windows in a separate partition. There are two utilities that you can use to install multiple OS's that will definitely keep the headaches to a minimum. I personally prefer Boot Manager, which IBM originally shipped with OS/2, but PowerQuest has licensed it and includes a copy of it with Partition Magic. Boot Manager allows you to create multiple PRIMARY partitions (up to three on a drive, since Boot Manager itself occupies 2MB of disk space as the active partition) and install Operating Systems to those three partitions. This is how I have mine set up at home, with OS/2 Warp 4, PC DOS7/ Win3.11, and Windows NT Workstation all installed. I use a second drive for my application/data partitions. Each OS recognizes FAT partitions, so I have a FAT partition primarily for use with DOS, but also for sharing files between OS/2 and NT. OS/2 then has a data/app partition that is formatted HPFS, and NT has a data/app partition that is formatted NTFS.

When you boot with Boot Manager active, it gives you a menu of operating systems to boot with. By default it chooses the last OS you booted to after a 30 second timeout. But with Partition Magic you can specify other options for booting, such as a default OS, and different names for the OS partitions.

The other utility is called System Commander. I've used it, and it works well. You can install multiple OS's and OS versions to a single partition, as long as you keep the OS system files in different directories. For example, you could install MS-DOS 6.22 to a directory called DOS622, and PC DOS 7 to a directory called DOS7, and then Windows NT to a directory called WINNT4...you get the point. As long as you don't use the same directory name twice, you can install up to (get this) 256 Operating Systems on the same box! When I was in a funky mood, I once used System Commander to install 10 different operating systems in the same partition - different versions of DOS, different versions of OS/2, Win95 and NT workstation all on the same system. By using FAT, OS's that read FAT drives can be installed to the same partition.

I don't know if I could stand to have a box without multiple OS's. Believe me, once you start down that road it's very addictive (-:

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

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