Old Boot Loaders for PC

[Thraka]

Hey everyone. My first post here. I have a few old DOS machines that I multiboot into various flavors of Windows and DOS. I was curious about what different programs people still use for this today. I purchased and still use, BootIT Bare Metal which works really well. It also has the old Norton Ghost type of imaging stuff in it. Before this, I was using OSL2000 which worked pretty good.

What do you use? What have you used in the past?

[louisw3]

Back in the day when I multibooted, I used OS/2 2.0's boot manager. It worked really really great. Even when I'd given up on OS/2, the boot manager was a great thing to keep around. Then I went linux for a while to run bochs (so slow) and vmware 1.x, then back to windows with Virtual PC for Windows. Such a shame Microsoft destroyed a fantastic product.

But yeah, today? It's all about emulation/vitualization.

[nathaniel87]

XOSL is a pretty cool bootloader

http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/home.html

[Thraka]

XOSL and OSL2000 look very alike for the initial setup window. I wonder if they were at some time branched from something common?

[Beta12]

I am using the old network bootloaders like TCP-IP BOOT-PROM, Etherboot, gPXE. BOOT-PROM and Etherboot have NIC ISA drivers e.g popular 3COM Etherlink III 3C509B ISA.

[pittical]

Back in the good old times I didn't really multiboot much, and if I did I used boot floppies. These days I outfit all of my old machines with CF-to-IDE adapters instead of HDDs, so I just swap in another card. This also makes it easy to do backups, I just plug the card into a reader and 'dd' the whole thing somehwere safe.

[os2fan2]

System Commander was the thing i used back in the days of 200 MB systems. I had 23 operating systems on it.

[nirvana175]

I also use System Commander to this day. I am stuck on version 8, and it still recognizes up to Windows 7. Haven't tried Win8 though, but what I love about SC are the wizards for installing new OSes, the included partition manager, the graphical interface, and that you could make a bootable ISO or floppy from it that lets you browse your hard disks contents without booting the OS. Also it lets you share volumes across OSes (or hide them), and the manuals explain everything (even the OSes limitations) with great detail.

A good piece of software SC was.

[DOS]

Well, I started out with a PC where I got to choose which OS to boot every time I powered it on because it had no hard drive so I had to pick a floppy

Later on I used LILO. Back in those days of Windows 95, I had heard that you ought to set your boot order in the BIOS to C drive, then A drive (nobody thought about non-Microsoft operating systems when they wrote the BIOS I guess!), so of course when I wanted to boot from a floppy I had to go and change that, because this was in the days before the BIOS might let you get into a menu to select the boot device. I eventually realized that I could get LILO to give me a menu option to boot from floppy, which was very convenient. This was probably the only time in my life I had some new technology before other people I wish I'd had GRUB back then, though - much nicer with its command line.

Nowadays, I use VMs and emulators (Bochs, PCE, QEMU, VirtualBox, DOSemu), and I guess if I couldn't somehow make something work on one of those I'd probably rather just use a separate physical machine than have to boot into another OS where I don't have all my usual tools, notes, and so on.

[SoftWitch]

The very useful XFDISK is quite old and comes with a boot manager
http://www.mecronome.de/xfdisk/

[Nilquader]

I usually use GRUB(4DOS) to boot al DOS-style operating systems. It can be configured from within DOS, so I don't need to boot any linux-style OS.

Get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

[baaj7749]

syslinux is another good choice

[MrFreeman]

I usually use GRUB(4DOS) to boot al DOS-style operating systems. It can be configured from within DOS, so I don't need to boot any linux-style OS.

Get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

Offtopic Comment

There is a newer version maintained by another person.

On my Acer laptop, I have a dual-boot with Windows 10 and Slackware Linux 14.1 and I use LILO as the boot loader.

[pool7]

I haven't used much besides LILO and GRUB, both great bootloaders.

A commercial alternative of which I heard great things is BootIt Bare Metal (by TeraByte Unlimited).