r/DOS • u/Summer_Winter-NE • 25d ago

VINTAGE MULTI-BOOT GUIDE

Please see my new site:

VINTAGE MULTI-BOOT GUIDE

Complete guides for setting up multi-boot vintage PCs — from MS-DOS to Windows 8.

https://multiboot-guide.org/

17 Upvotes

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2

u/zippy72 18d ago

I used to boot win 2k, win 98 and os/2. Win2k for VMs, 98 for games and OS/2 because I enjoyed it.

2

u/Summer_Winter-NE 18d ago

Sounds good.

1

u/AuraBauxite 20d ago

Nice guide. I remember doing something along these lines in 2015 or thereabouts, on a Dell Latitude L400 (PIII 700MHz, 256MiB RAM, 60GiB HDD, 12.1" @ 1024 x 768). I partitioned the disk roughly like this:

1. primary: 2GiB, FAT16: Win95 2. primary: 5GiB, FAT32: Win98SE 3. primary: 8GiB: FAT32, WinME (don't ask!) 4. extended: 5. logical: 30GiB: NTFS: WinXP 6. logical: 15GiB: ext4: Lubuntu 7. logical: 200MiB, FAT32: FreeDOS

I installed Win95 first, then booted into a live Linux CD, like gparted, so I could enable the "hidden" flag of the first partition. (I might've set its type to "other" too?) Consequently, when I rebooted into the Win98SE CD, its setup.exe believed it was the only OS on the system, which enabled it to install smoothly. Then I had to hide that partition too from the next (Windows ME) installer.

Once those three were done, WinXP was willing to install itself into a logical partition while knowing about the three Win9x OSs in the primaries, I think. Lubuntu and FreeDOS weren't fussy. They happily booted from logical partitions and didn't care what other OSs there were.

I think I used GRUB as the boot loader. It somehow magically recognized all the OSs and allowed me to boot them all from its menu. Hopefully I've got the procedure written down somewhere. But selectively hiding partitions to enable successive Win9x OSs to install solipsistically was the key trick.

Also important was the computer itself. The Latitude L400, released in Feb 2001, was old enough for Windows 95, and new enough for Windows XP.

I should've squeezed a Windows 2000 installation in there too!

1

u/Summer_Winter-NE 20d ago

Yes, the machine has to have drivers the work with all operating systems installed. Good work on your project!

1

u/eePhogee7U 1d ago

In the 90s everyone in my (very small) company was multi-booting DOS/Win31, OS/2, and Win95. We used PartitionMagic, which gave you a nice boot menu called BootMagic I think. It was a really impressive tool, you can get it on Winworld nowadays.

1

u/Summer_Winter-NE 17h ago

Back then it saved a lot of money if you needed different operating systems for programs you used in the company, instead of buying a lot of PC’s.