Good morning, again:
I have had several requests for the draft procedure for setting up a
Windows XP computer to dual-boot DOS. I wanted to provide a bit
more information, answering the most common questions I have
received.
1. Why don't you just use the official Microsoft procedure for
dual-booting Windows XP and DOS?
The Microsoft procedure works fine. However, it requires destroying
the existing Windows XP installation, installing DOS, and then
reinstalling Windows XP. The computers I am dealing with have
Windows XP pre-installed and I am not willing to destroy the
existing installation. My procedure allows adding DOS without
affecting the Windows XP installation.
2. Why don't you just use a commercial package to re-partition
the disk and dual boot?
I used to use Partition Magic for this. However, Partition Magic 8.02
did not successfully resized most of the NTFS partitions I tested it
with so I sent it back. Also, Partition Magic's license agreement
required buying a seperate license for each computer I wanted to
dual boot. The open source tools I am using, including ntfsresize,
qtParted, and the GAG boot loader, are stable and widely used by
people who want to dual-boot Linux and Windows XP and are
available free.
I have no experience with other commercial packages.
3. How can I try this without having to download a large rescue CD
image?
The procedure calls for downloading a free bootable Linux System
Rescue CD. This is over 100 MegaBytes. It turns out that a group
at www.linuxcd.org sells copies of the CD for under $4.00 including
shipping. You can order the CD from them if you would rather
not mess with downloading it. There are similar resellers in Europe.
Thanks very much for all of the feedback you have provided. I
would like to turn this into a "cookbook" for installing CT and TR-Log.
A lot of computer users have never even seen DOS and have no
idea how to deal with it. I plan to add sections on creating custom
DOS boot CD's and autoexec.bat/config.sys files.
If you are willing to test my dual-boot procedure, let me know and I
will mail you the Microsoft Word file. It's about 1.2 MegaBytes at the
moment.
Thanks.
73,
Mark, KD4D
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