TCS - Multiple Operating Systems on One Machine

Multiple Operating Systems on One Machine

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the September 1995 issue
and Reprinted in the August 1996 issue
of the I/O Port Newsletter

Bruce wrote a very good article describing the Installation Options for Windows 95. I have had several questions about how Bruce and I got four different operating systems installed on our computers, and I thought I would write this article to go along with Bruce's article.

First install OS/2 Warp, and select the custom configuration, which first takes you to OS/2's version of FDISK. Select Install Boot Manager, and tell it to put the Boot Manager partition at the end of your free space. Select two primary partitions, one for MS/DOS, and one for OS/2 Warp, and tell FDISK to add each one to your Boot Manager menu. I used 250 meg for my DOS partition, and 125 meg for my OS/2 Warp partition, but I could have used less (Bruce's OS/2 Warp partition is just 80 meg, and even that has considerable free space). Assign logical drives to fill up the rest of your free space, keeping in mind that partitions up to 128 meg will have 2K clusters, partitions from 128 meg to 256 meg will have 4K clusters, and partitions from 256 meg to 512 meg will have 8K clusters, etc. I have a 4 gig drive, and it is broken into several 125 meg logical drives (for small files that need the 2K cluster size), most are 250 meg, and only three are larger than 250 meg, and none of them is larger than 500 meg.

Select one of the primary partitions, set it Installable, and then install the proper operating system (MS/DOS or OS/2 Warp) on that partition. Then go back into OS/2's FDISK, set the other partition Installable, and install the other operating system.

Reboot the computer a couple of times, and verify that you can come up in either MS/DOS or OS/2 Warp, depending on what you select from the Boot Manager Menu. Finally boot up in MS/DOS.

Install Windows NT, telling it to use its version of Boot Manager. This will disable the OS/2 Boot Manager, but don't worry. Once you get NT installed, and have verified that it works, reboot and select MS/DOS rather than NT. Then install Windows '95, using the instructions in Bruce's article, selecting either the second or third option, to keep Win95 separate from MS/DOS.

Once you have verified that Win95 works, and that you can boot into either WinNT, Win95, or MS/DOS, boot the system using the install disks for OS/2, and select the custom configuration which puts you into OS/2 FDISK. Reactivate your Boot Manager partition, adding both the MS/DOS partition and the OS/2 Partition to it.

You can now boot your computer and select either MS/DOS or OS/2 (the default should be MS/DOS). If you select MS/DOS you will get a choice of WinNT or Windows '95 (the default should be Windows '95), and if you take Windows '95 you will get a menu giving you a choice of a number of different ways to bring up Windows '95, and then one entry (usually either 7 or 8) will be for your old version of MS/DOS (and that should be your default).

If you have your defaults set as indicated above, you can reboot, and press the enter key three times, and it will boot up in your old MS/DOS 6.22. Two enter keys and selecting the desired Win 95 boot option will take you into Win95. One enter and selecting the desired WinNT option will take you into WinNT. And selecting OS/2 Warp from the first menu will take you to that operating system.

Bruce and I both have this configuration: MS/DOS 6.22, WFW 3.11, OS/2 Warp, Windows NT, and Windows '95, on the same machine. And OS/2 Boot Manager will support up to four operating systems, and it is only being used for two, so if we wanted to we could add a couple of flavors of Unix as well.



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Tulsa Computer Society 02/18/97
Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com