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How to Boot-up a
Microsoft® Windows™ 2000/XP/2003 OS
install from within an Extended Partition
This document is Copyright ©
2009 by Daniel B. Sedory
NOT to be reproduced in any form without Permission of the Author !
NOTE: Although this page is still
under development,
Here are some initial thoughts on the subject
which might help some of you:
Introduction
If you're considering dual- or multi-booting a number of OSs on your computer, you
should spend time deciding the best course of action before installing any particular OS on a disk; unless you intend for it to be the only OS on that
disk. Windows™ operating systems were created without any thought (at best) or to prevent (at worst) users from easily running another company's OS on
the same computer. But this state of affairs also resulted in some complaints from Microsoft's loyal consumers when it came time to evaluate new MS-OS
versions. In general, if you're going to include an MS-OS on your disk, the older one(s) should be installed first, followed by Windows XP and lastly a
well behaved system such as Linux, or possibly a Unix variant such as BSD; depending upon the specific distribution(s) involved.
NOTE: The Windows™ 7 OS is difficult to multi-boot because it not only wants to reserve a much larger amount of space at the beginning
of a disk (it begins at Sector 2048 instead Sector 63), but also uses much different boot loader code than any previous MS-OS which requires storing data
about how the PC is to be booted-up in a special database. You can read about these issues at: www.multibooters.co.uk
However, some people end up in a situation where they cannot re-install or move an existing OS from their hard disk! Is this your case? If so, it's likely some Linux or Unix OS you do not want to or cannot (for lack of a backup disk) remove; even though you were able to shrink some of the parition(s) to make room for Windows!
I hope you found this Introduction helpful.
The Starman.
Created: January 25, 2009 (2009.01.25).