Plan of Attack Home Part 1: Before We Start

The Aim:

Before we can embark on a journey, we need to know where we are going. So, I need to state what I am hoping your machine will look like, when we have finished this tutorial. I have tried to make sure that each system will look as much like the other systems as far as possible (partitions have the same drive letter, CD-ROM drives have the same drive letter, etc) within, of course, the scope of the Operating System (i.e. Linux has no drive letters, so this feature can not be duplicated on Linux).

So here is what the system will have:

  1. Four different operating systems (Dos6.22, Win98, WinNT 4.0 and Linux)
  2. No third party boot manager (we will be using NT's boot manager)
  3. A shared Data drive
  4. Similarity between Operating Systems
  5. An easily accessible boot partition (important for troubleshooting dead systems)
  6. HD Space saving tips
  7. A standard set of utilities to help us achieve our aims.



The "Perfect World" Assumptions:

These are the following assumptions that I am making before starting out, assuming a "Perfect World". I first want to show how a blank system would be slowly built up into a perfect multi-booting system. At the end of the tutorial, I will explain how to install different OS's if the order in which you have already installed some OS's is not the same as I have stated. I hope that the rest of this tutorial will still prove helpful in getting you set up:

  1. You want to have at least a two Operating System multi-boot PC

  2. You have got at least 4 Gigs of HD space (it can be done with less, but that is not recommended. My cousins have a 1 Gig HD, split up into NT4 and Win95, and they are very cramped for space)

  3. You know how to install each Operating System

  4. You are reasonably confident in working in a Non-GUI environment (i.e. no pretty pictures telling you what you are doing, just text; but for those of you not so confident, I am going to provide a lot of pretty pictures on what to do in the non-GUI environment)

  5. You will be printing out these instructions. To that end, I have provided a printer friendly version of this website in a .ZIP format. Look at the bottom of the menu bar for the black disk with the Green sticker. If you want to do a "dry run" and do all these steps first, without affecting your actual system, you can use a program called VMware to simulate a blank HD, with no operating system, and then slowly build up your virtual system inside the VMware shell

  6. You enjoy challenges

  7. You want to be a millionaire (my tutorial will not in any way help with this assumption, it's just an easy assumption to make :) )
The Terms Used:
Here is a list of technical (an non-technical) terms I will be using throughout this tutorial, and what they mean:

  • PC, machine, system - These are interchangeable, and mean the same thing.

  • BOOT / SYSTEM partition - The BOOT partition is the partition that stores the system files for the Operating System. The SYSTEM partition is the partition that the PC boots off.
    Why is it this way round? Ask Micro$oft. They have used this naming convention throughout their literature and so that is why I am using it this way. Once, when I did ask why they used it this way round, the reply I got was "Don't ask".

  • FAT16 / 32 - File systems used by Win95, Win98 and Win2K. The FAT stands for File Allocation Table, and it is this "table of contents" that the operating system uses to find where the data is stored on the HD. It is a slow filing system, and has no built-in security. There is a limitation on FAT16, in that it can only create partitions to a maximum size of 2047 Megs. Unfortunately, without any third party utilities, it is the only file system that Win95, Win98, NT4, Win200 and Linux all read and write to natively... oh well.

  • NTFS / NTFSv5 - NT's File System (by the way, that's what NTFS stands for). It is a more robust, quicker file system. It has inbuilt security and can be used to created many different fault tolerant disk systems. NTFSv5 was developed for the release of Service Pack 4 for NT 4.0, and is an updated version of the file system.

  • Ext2 - Linux's file system

  • Paging File - the actual file used to store a system's Virtual memory

  • GUI - Graphical User Interface. Quick rule of Thumb: If you can drag and drop, you are in a GUI environment

  • Master Boot Record - the MBR is the small 512 byte section of hard drive space that is called by your computer's BIOS, to start loading the operating system. Each operating system has it's own information that it wants to put in the MBR. Later, I will show you how to use Bootpart to create files containing these different Boot Records, and how they will be accessed from NT's boot menu.




The Utilities:

 Here is a list of the utilities that I have provided on the boot disk. It is all you will need to complete
this tutorial

  1. Partition Magic 3.05 (text based)
  2. Bootpart 2.20
  3. Delpart
  4. Nukepart
  5. NTFSdos 3.0 (Read Only)
  6. Various DOS 6.22 utilities
      - Choice.com (for the menu system)
      - Deltree.exe (in case you need to delete directories)
      - himem.sys (access upper memory)
      - Mouse.com (DOS mouse driver)
      - Mscdex.exe (CD-ROM driver)
      - smartdrv.sys (Virtual memory for DOS)
      - ted.exe (File editor)
      - Xcopy (Not the standard DOS app, but a Freeware version of XXcopy16.
        Type xcopy /? for all the parameters)











You will also need at least two of the following:


My Boot Disk

Above is a hyperlink to a boot disk, with all the utilities 1 through 6 on it. The file is in the format of an Executable file. Download the file, and save it to disk. When you are ready to run the program, put a 3½" disk into your A: drive, and double click on the BOOT_DISK.EXE file. It will automatically Format the disk, uncompress the files and put them on the disk. It will also make the disk bootable, as a DOS 6.22 boot disk.

Win98 Boot Disk

This is a link to the standard Win98 bootdisk. Download and install it on a different stiffie disk, if and only if, you can not set your BIOS to boot off your Win98 CD-ROM. NT4 does not need a boot disk, as the initial install command can be run from DOS 6.22.
My System:

Here is a list of the specs of the machine I used in creating this tutorial. You will notice that it is a little on the lean side of modern computing. There are a few reasons. Firstly, I am poor, so I cannot afford a cool new machine. Secondly, the program I am using to supply the screen shots places certain limitations on the system I can present.
Processor : Pentium 200 MMX
Hard Drive : IDE 4.3 Gigs
Memory : 48 Megs
Screen : 800 x 600
CD-ROM : IDE 32x
Sound : Creative Labs AWE 32
NIC : 3Com Etherlink II
Mouse : Fijitsu P/S 2 (with the roller ball)

My system is set to boot off the following devices, in the order shown:
1)     Floppy Disk
2)     IDE CD-ROM
3)     Hard Drive

This is the best order of devices off which to boot.
Try if you can, to set your BIOS to boot in this order.


Plan of Attack Home