PC Hacks

Chapter 9. Boot-Up Hacks

Introduction: Hacks #85-94

Setting up your PC to be able to boot the operating system of your choice is a great way to conserve space and energy and is of great benefit to those who like to play games that must run under DOS or Windows 9x (and this chapter has a couple of hacks on improving the performance of these operating systems).

With a bit of preplanning and the right software, you can hack your PC to have multiple operating system personalities, including any operating system from DOS to Linux, as well as any and multiple versions of Windows. There is a variety of options for booting different operating systems on the same PC, with or without separate hard drives or partitions. Multibooting is a great solution for those who love DOS-based games that don't work at all under NT, Linux, or 2000 and work only marginally well under XP. You can keep a Windows 98 or Me installation around just for running those games.

With various multiboot techniques, you can allow different operating systems to share a common filesystem or let each operating system maintain its own unique partitions and filesystems. If you want to share files between operating systems, you have to determine which filesystems are common to all of the operating systems you want to use—in most cases that will be nothing more advanced than FAT-32 partitions—and realize that DOS does not support long (256-character) filenames. (For example, a file named MicroSoft.txt will be named MICROS~1.TXT ...