Peltio wrote:

"willbill" ha scritto

i'm mid-way with a quad boot setup with
DOS (98!), Win 98SE, Win2000, and eventually Linux


Are they all on the same physical disk, or did you find a way to
boot from the secondary IDE channel?


there are two approaches to "multi-boot" PCs:

1. you just swap the primary IDE channel master IDE drive
(and leave everything else the same)

imo, that's gotten a lot easier with these terrific new
round IDE cables, some of which are very robust. i never
liked the slide in tray approach (via a 5.25" front panel
opening on the front of the case) for swaping HD's in/out,
and i liked it less and less especially as IDE moved to
faster transfer rates (100 and 133). it also helps
if you've got a computer case that lends itself to swaping
the primary master hard drive (removable mobo tray and/or
an easily removable HD bracket (many removable brackets
aren't easy to remove once the mobo and components are in),
and which has a light weight door so that you pop off the
door for quick backups (via DOS Ghost) or reasonbly fast
HD swaps (where robust round IDE cables again come in handy)

2. get software that permits a multi-boot setup
without having to do any hard drive swapping.
the one i have long experience with is vcom's
System Commander (see: www.v-com.com), now
at version 8.1

when you use boot manager software is when
you need a *current* book specific to the subject
coz not all OS's will work from other than
the primary channel IDE master drive


I'd like to put a linux on my second hard disk.


i'm guessing that most (all?) recent Linux packages
will permit that. also see above

also over the last 10 years my occasional visits
with Linux have impressed me, but you do tend
to run into more flakey software problems,
drivers that don't work, and so on, not that
there aren't plenty of those on every
other OS you can name

afaik, when you do go with whichever flavor
of Linux catches your fancy, you are paying
them for their packaging, and UNIX scripts, as well
as their selection of specific kernels and drivers
that are stable and work well together, not to
mention whatever support they offer. be sure
you get a recent version of whatever you go with
(to keep problems with large hard drives away)



if you wanna define 64 GB on a large
hard drive for use with 98SE (and the
"cooperative" multi-tasking 98SE apps!),
good luck coz i think you're gonna need it


But I already did it and it worked fine.
Er... okay, the drive died by mechanical failure but that was another
problem... :]
Perhaps the limit shown by VCOM refers to a single partition.
That would make much more sense.
(I have never gone beyond 30 GB per partition)


good as the manual is that comes with vcom's
System Commander, there are a lot of things
in it where it helps a lot if you already
have a fair amount of knowledge. e.g.
they constantly use the word "DOS" with
a 2 GB partition size limit (which is true
for MS-DOS 6.22 (and immediately prior DOS's))
since they are limited to FAT16

vcom hardly says anthing about DOS95B nor DOS98SE
(and never by those specific names) since they were
not not marketed as separate products; but if you
boot from a 98SE floppy, you'll be able to see FAT32
as well as FAT16 partitions.
(and likely FAT12 too)

fwiw, the actual partition size limit for FAT32 is
way beyond 32GB, and the vcom Partition Manager will
let you do it to the limit. but given the number
of files/directory limit with FAT32 i personally
keep mind to under 31GB and tend to put my biggest
files on my one such partition

bill